Does GPT-2 Know Your Phone Number?
I've been saying this for years, but every post you make online, every unencrypted email, IM, text message, etc, will eventually end up getting sold off as training data for future machine learning projects.<p>Every company stores this stuff for ages, and the value of candid conversation data just keeps increasing. Eventually these companies are either going to get hacked, get bought, or go bankrupt, and all the cleartext data they hold is going to get passed around to various data markets and end up incorporated into GPT-12 or whatever.<p>The moral of the story here isn't that companies need to stop storing data, or that we need to run ML researchers out of town. It's that people really need to start using the encryption technologies that were built decades ago to protect some of their most valuable assets, their mental model of the world. Otherwise these systems, which are being trained to extract as much value out of you and the ones you love as possible, will use this data you're giving them for free against you, and it'll be to late to do anything about it then.