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Samsung employees unwittingly leak internal documents, source code to ChatGPT

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In what’s proving to be a nightmare for the Korean smartphone manufacturer, Samsung employees seem to be increasingly reliant on ChatGPT for tasks like creating presentations out of meeting notes and asking it to optimise test sequences. The problem with this approach? Most if not all of this data is sensitive, meaning Samsung wouldn’t want a shred of it being fed in as training data into an AI chatbot that millions around the world are using. 

Samsung engineers have been using ChatGPT to optimise test sequences to find faults in the chips they’re designing. Another documented case involves an employee using ChatGPT to convert meeting notes into a presentation, except the contents weren’t exactly supposed to be public knowledge. TechRadar reports that in under a month, there were three separate incidents of employees unintentionally leaking sensitive data to ChatGPT, meaning that proprietary knowledge is now in OpenAI’s hands. 

Photo: Tada Images/Shutterstock.com
Samsung employees have been sharing sensitive data with ChatGPT. | Photo: Tada Images/Shutterstock.com

It had previously allowed engineers working in its semiconductor subdivision to use ChatGPT to fix problems with their source code, but that led to developers inputting sensitive data, including the source code for new programs and internal hardware-related data. Samsung has a firm footing in the semiconductor and several other industries where competition is stiff and any leaked data can lead to quite a mishap. 

The company has now issued a warning telling employees that any data inputted to ChatGPT is now OpenAI’s property as the latter retains user input as training data for the chatbot. While it doesn’t seem to be working on requesting the return or deletion of this data from OpenAI, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s not going to be an internal clampdown on employees using the chatbot with sensitive information. 

However, Samsung also identifies that an AI chatbot like ChatGPT can be beneficial to its employees as well, leading to the development of its own in-house chatbot. Although the prompts are only limited to 1024 bytes in size. Samsung has some AI innovation under its belt and despite the bump in the road that Bixby was, it might just produce something good this time.

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Yadullah Abidi

Yadullah Abidi

Yadullah is a Computer Science graduate who writes/edits/shoots/codes all things cybersecurity, gaming, and tech hardware. When he's not, he streams himself racing virtual cars. He's been writing and reporting on tech and cybersecurity with websites like Candid.Technology and MakeUseOf since 2018. You can contact him here: yadullahabidi@pm.me.

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