Artificial intelligence – especially Open AI’s ChatGPT platform - has hit the business world like a sledgehammer.
While the commercial potential of AI is massive, companies are trying to play catch up to ChatGPT by establishing policies and procedures on how the technology can be deployed on the job.
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One more ominous byproduct of emerging company guidelines is how to handle sensitive company data – and how to avoid sharing that data with ChatGPT.
Samsung recently learned that lesson the hard way.
The South Korean manufacturing conglomerate discovered that on three separate occasions, company employees leaked sensitive company information with ChatGPT.
According to the Korea Times, Samsung recently stated on its in-company bulletin “calling attention to the misuse of ChatGPT.”
“Managers have also trained their workers on the scope of the use of this service,” The Times reported. “These actions are aimed at preventing data leaks by sharing internal information with the chat AI, given that semiconductor-related information is a state secret.”
One account of the leak states a Samsung staffer fed faulty semiconductor software data into ChatGPT to help solve a coding problem. Another employee fed company meeting conversations involving proprietary data to the AI chatbot to generate meeting minutes.
Once apprised of the problems, Samsung clamped down with a company-wide edict to cap employee ChatGPT prompts to 1024 bytes.
According to the technology publication Gizmodo, data given to ChatGPT is data the chatbot absorbs and, by design, cannot give back.
“The problem with sharing company secrets with ChatGPT is that those written queries don’t necessarily disappear when an employee shuts off their computer,” Gizmodo reported. “OpenAI says it may use data submitted to ChatGPT or other consumer services to improve its AI models.”
As OpenAI specifically holds all incoming prompt data, companies may have little recourse other than to ban ChatGPT usage outright – at least until proper compliance guidelines are in place.
Until then, Samsung joins the burgeoning number of big brand companies like Amazon, Walmart, and J.P. Morgan Chase that have already established curbs on employee use of ChatGPT.
