Ask HN: GPT-3 reveals my full name to anybody who asks. Can I do anything?
by BoppreH on Hacker News.
Alternatively: What’s the current status of Personally Identifying Information and language models? 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’s hostile internet I see this kind of soft pseudonymity as my digital personal space, and expect to have it respected. 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! 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’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 actually being done. 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? I don’t care much about my name being public, but I don’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. [1]: https://ift.tt/Xr0Ij7V [2]: https://ift.tt/3N2fRQK [3]: https://ift.tt/9z5r8uy