The boom of artificial intelligence (AI) has made it part of many people's everyday lives. For some, it has become second nature to pull out their phone and ask AI about anything from recipes to relationship advice, but there is one area that you must be careful when sharing with artificial intelligence: your business.
Policymakers are working to create safeguards around AI, but for the present time dozens of AI related lawsuits are working their way through the courts. These lawsuits could take years to resolve, and laws may need to be modified after. Until laws are put in place protecting data privacy it is important to understand how AI tools use your business information.
In 2023, employees at Samsung copied lines of code into ChatGPT, and other similar AI tools, in hopes it would help fix coding errors. In doing so they shared sensitive company information with a third party that was outside of their companies control. Some AI tools are designed to learn from the information shared with it, and then pass that information along to others. Although copyrights that existed on the code did not automatically become property of the AI company once it was shared, the AI could learn from the code that was shared with it and could potentially share it with others.
Open AI’s user guide warns “"We are not able to delete specific prompts from your history. Please don't share any sensitive information in your conversations.”
What does this mean for your company? Use of public AI services can be detrimental to your company if you share private information with it. If you still want to have access to AI technologies, but do not want the risk of data leaks, you can pay for a dedicated, private instance of an AI model. This is owned by your company therefore keeping your data safe.
As a business owner, you need to be mindful of the actions taken by yourself and your employees. With AI becoming more common, privacy issues are sometimes forgotten leading to data leaks and loss of intellectual property. In order to keep your business safe, take time to set company policies related to the use of AI by employees, and set up a private, company-managed AI system if you want the technological benefits without the risk of sharing private data.