ChatGPT is full of sensitive private information and spits out verbatim text from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, fandom wikis, Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, Wikipedia pages, news blogs, random internet comments, and much more.
Using this tactic, the researchers showed that there are large amounts of privately identifiable information (PII) in OpenAI’s large language models. They also showed that, on a public version of ChatGPT, the chatbot spit out large passages of text scraped verbatim from other places on the internet.
“In total, 16.9 percent of generations we tested contained memorized PII,” they wrote, which included “identifying phone and fax numbers, email and physical addresses … social media handles, URLs, and names and birthdays.”
Edit: The full paper that’s referenced in the article can be found here
Yup, with 50B parameters or whatever it is these days there is a lot of room for encoding latent linguistic space where it starts to just look like attention-based compression. Which is itself an incredibly fascinating premise. Universal Approximation Theorem, via dynamic, contextual manifold quantization. Absolutely bonkers, but it also feels so obvious.
In a way it makes perfect sense. Human cognition is clearly doing more than just storing and recalling information. “Memory” is imperfect, as if it is sampling some latent space, and then reconstructing some approximate perception. LLMs genuinely seem to be doing something similar.