Title: Alternatively: What&#x27;s the current status of Personally Identifying Information and language models?<p>I try to hide my real name whenever possible, out of an abundance of caution. You can still find it if you search carefully, but in today&#x27;s hostile internet I see this kind of soft pseudonymity as my digital personal space, and expect to have it respected.<p>When playing around in GPT-3 I tried making sentences with my username. Imagine my surprise when I see it spitting out my (globally unique, unusual) full name!<p>Looking around, I found a paper that says language models spitting out personal information is a problem[1], a Google blog post that says there&#x27;s not much that can be done[2], and an article that says OpenAI might automatically replace phone numbers in the future but other types of PII are harder to remove[3]. But nothing on what is <i>actually</i> being done.<p>If I had found my personal information on Google search results, or Facebook, I could ask the information to be removed, but GPT-3 seems to have no such support. Are we supposed to accept that large language models may reveal private information, with no recourse?<p>I don&#x27;t care much about my <i>name</i> being public, but I don&#x27;t know what else it might have memorized (political affiliations? Sexual preferences? Posts from 13-year old me?). In the age of GDPR this feels like an enormous regression in privacy.<p>EDIT: a small thank you for everybody commenting so far for not directly linking to specific results or actually writing my name, however easy it might be.<p>If my request for pseudonymity sounds strange given my lax infosec:<p>- I&#x27;m more worried about the consequences of language models in general than my own case, and<p>- people have done a lot more for a lot less name information[4].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2012.07805" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2012.07805</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai.googleblog.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;privacy-considerations-in-large.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai.googleblog.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;privacy-considerations-in-...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;18&#x2F;openai_gpt3_data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;18&#x2F;openai_gpt3_data&#x2F;</a><p>[4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Slate_Star_Codex#New_York_Times_controversy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Slate_Star_Codex#New_York_Time...</a>
Upvote: