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Comment by fc417fc802

14 hours ago

That's entirely unreasonable. Allegations of malfeasance always need to be backed up by evidence.

But there is evidence, the blog post says: "While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models ."

In other words, yes, they had been using ChatGPT, and yes, ChatGPT could very well have trained on their data. Now that there is evidence, we need an investigation: yes or no, was it the case?

  • That is not an admission of malfeasance though? As I read it they don't know if anyone fed relevant private documents into the model under an account configured to permit training on user data.

    If there's more to the story I'd be interested to hear it.

    • Of malfeasance no, but they could have easily plagiarized unintentionally. If you commit mansalughter, you still need to explain yourself, even if it was a complete unlucky accident.

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But the evidence is in the hand of the potential culprit. That's why allegations can be enough to force confiscation and intrusion to get evidence in safe hands before it is destroyed by the accused party.

  • Only in the event that there is some reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. Which would generally require evidence.

    You don't just get to subpoena your neighbor's bank account because "I know he's stealing from me" you need to first present credible evidence that you were stolen from and that he is among the most likely culprits.

    • But I can subpoena my neighbours bank account when I see him driving a brand new 500'000$ car and I have a 490'000$ hole in my bank account and he works in the bank where my money is. And when questioned he evades some questions and threatens to destroy my career.

      Any other argument, fc417fc802?

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That is backwards. It is the responsibility of a researcher to do a thorough literature review and conscientiously avoid plagiarism or claiming false novelty.

Nobody except OpenAI knows whether or not OpenAI trained on their data. So the burden remains on OpenAI here.

  • Incorrect, Buckmaster and Alpöge can comment if they had the ChatGPT "Improve the model for everyone" setting enabled or disabled.

    If it was enabled, then their work was included in the training dataset.

    • As I understand it, that setting does not prevent them training on user data, just which derivatives are used (i.e. just PII scrubbed vs certain types of synthetic summarization)

    • In order for this to be the strong evidence everyone also has to believe that the setting is absolutely true. That some logging from some piece of the system could not also leak the prompt information in such a way that it could have been included as training data. Perhaps the design of how data is collected for the training dataset is so rigorous as to make this a practical impossibility. But, it's asking a lot without sufficient detail to completely exclude from possibility that one setting is all that could possibly have been absolutely load bearing in deciding if the other researcher's active efforts meaningfully contaminated the internal model.

      At least, as an ignorant outsider, that's how it seems to me.

  • That is an absurd and entirely untenable position that breaks with approximately all western conventions.

    Only the CIA knows whether or not they're actively covering up reptilian space aliens exerting control over the US government. Therefore the burden of proof remains on the CIA to prove that they are not actively participating in such a scheme.

    • I don't understand, OpenAI can just say: "yes/no we did/did not train on your data". It's not a hard question to answer, and it is a question that OpenAI should be able to answer for all data we feed into ChatGPT.

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