ChatGPT is full of sensitive private information and spits out verbatim text from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, fandom wikis, Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, Wikipedia pages, news blogs, random internet comments, and much more.
Using this tactic, the researchers showed that there are large amounts of privately identifiable information (PII) in OpenAI’s large language models. They also showed that, on a public version of ChatGPT, the chatbot spit out large passages of text scraped verbatim from other places on the internet.
“In total, 16.9 percent of generations we tested contained memorized PII,” they wrote, which included “identifying phone and fax numbers, email and physical addresses … social media handles, URLs, and names and birthdays.”
Edit: The full paper that’s referenced in the article can be found here
Model collapse is likely to kill them in the medium term future. We’re rapidly reaching the point where an increasingly large majority of text on the internet, i.e. the training data of future LLMs, is itself generated by LLMs for content farms. For complicated reasons that I don’t fully understand, this kind of training data poisons the model.
It’s not hard to understand. People already trust the output of LLMs way too much because it sounds reasonable. On further inspection often it turns out to be bullshit. So LLMs increase the level of bullshit compared to the input data. Repeat a few times and the problem becomes more and more obvious.
Like incest for computers. Random fault goes in, multiplies and is passed down.
Photocopy of a photocopy.
Or, in more modern terms, JPEG of a JPEG.