This troubling ability could be used by scammers or to target ads.

Vechev and his team found that the large language models that power advanced chatbots can accurately infer an alarming amount of personal information about users—including their race, location, occupation, and more—from conversations that appear innocuous.

  • FaceDeer@kbin.social
    111·
    11 months ago

    I fed your comment to ChatGPT 3.5 (telling it that it was a comment that I had written to avoid triggering any of its “as a large language model blah blah privacy” conditioning) and this is what it said:

    Based on the comment you provided, here are some observations I can make about you:

    Technical Knowledge: Your understanding of machine learning and language models, particularly the reference to “locally-run models” and “smaller LLMs,” indicates that you have a technical background, likely in computer programming or a related field.

    Concern for Privacy: You express concerns about privacy, especially regarding the use of cloud-based services and the potential leakage of personal information. This suggests that you are privacy-conscious and value data security.

    Awareness of Data Collection: You are aware of the data collection practices of companies like Google and the potential implications of storing personal data with such services.

    Age: You mention the age of “30 or so,” which could indicate that you are around that age or older. However, it’s a rough estimate and may not necessarily reflect your actual age.

    Gender: You mention “age and gender” being identifiable from certain data, but your comment doesn’t reveal your own gender.

    Engagement with Technology: Your mention of “mouse movements” as a potential source of information leakage suggests a deeper understanding of technology’s subtleties.

    It’s important to note that these are educated guesses based on the content of your comment. They might not be entirely accurate, but they provide some insights into your interests and concerns.

    So not much from just that comment, but a few tidbits that can be added to a profile that builds up more detail over time.

    We were already facing this sort of thing before AI exploded, though. A lot of the various Reddit user analysis services out there were able to get a fair bit right about me based just off of my most recent 1000 comments (though I just checked my profile on RedditMetis and it did get a few significant things wrong, it’s clearly a pretty simple-minded approach to analysis).

    Heh. I just checked the link for why RedditMetis thinks I’m transgender and it referenced this comment where I’m literally objecting to RedditMetis’ interpretation that I’m transgender. Citogenesis at work.

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      LOL. Nice!

      I wouldn’t expect ChatGPT to be well-versed in forensic linguistics; I suspect a human expert could make better guesses based on seemingly-innocuous things like sentence structure and word choices. I’ve seen some research on estimating age and gender based on writing. There’s a primitive example of that here: https://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php

      My last comment is a bit short (it wants 300 words or more), but I am amused by the results:

      Genre: Informal
  Female = 338
  Male   = 309
  Difference = -29; 47.75%
  Verdict: Weak FEMALE

      I’ll pat myself on the back for writing more or less down the middle. :)

    • Kachilde@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      It doesn’t feel like it actually inferred anything from the comment.

      “You spoke about computers, so you probably know about computers”

      “You express concerns about privacy, so you are likely privacy conscious”

      “You said you were 30ish, so you’re maybe 30…ish”

      It essentially paraphrased each part of the comment, and gave it back to you like an analysis. Of course, this is ChatGPT, so it’s likely not trained for this sort of thing.

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social
        2·
        11 months ago

        It identified those elements as things that might be relevant about the person who wrote the comment. Obviously you can’t tell much from just a single comment like this - ChatGPT says as much here - but these elements accumulate as you process more and more comments.

        That ballpark estimate of OP’s age, for example, can be correlated to other comments where OP might reference particular pop culture things or old news events. The fact that he’s aware that mouse movements are a thing that you can do biometrics on might become relevant if the AI in question is trying to come up with products to sell - it now knows that this guy may have a desktop computer, since he thinks about computer mice. These things are things that are worth noting in a profile like that.

        The paraphrasing is a form of analysis, since it picks out certain relevant things to paraphrase while discarding things that aren’t relevant.

    • Phanatik@kbin.social
      3·
      11 months ago

      While it should teach me to be less forthcoming about my personal information but at the same time, the idea that services were built to crawl through my information with LLMs on top, inadvertently doing the same thing, makes my fucking skin crawl. Why is it so difficult to have a conversation on the internet without some creepy shit spying on everything you do.