In November 2022, the artificial intelligence research company OpenAI released the AI chatbot ChatGPT. Since its launch, the latter has gained a huge popularity. But not all companies or users welcome it with arms wide open. Amazon is among them. The latter recently even warned employees not to interact with ChatGPT and share confidential information.
In the internal Slack channel of Amazon, many employees raised a question about whether there are official guidelines for using ChatGPT on work devices. Others wondered if they were allowed to work with AI tools.
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Soon, an Amazon corporate lawyer joined the discussion. What we know is that the lawyer warned employees not to provide ChatGPT with “any Amazon confidential information,” including Amazon code being written. He also advised employees to follow the company’s existing non-disclosure policy, as some of ChatGPT’s responses looked very similar to Amazon’s internal situation.
Obviously, the sudden emergence of ChatGPT has raised many new ethical questions. ChatGPT is a conversational AI tool that responds to queries with clearer, smarter answers. As for Amazon, it could become a thorny issue.
Emily Bender, who teaches computational linguistics at the University of Washington, said that OpenAI is far from transparent about how it uses data. So companies have to think twice before providing any information with it.
In this regard, Amazon has already taken several internal measures to prevent employees from using ChatGPT. For example, when employees use work devices to access the ChatGPT website, a warning message pops up saying they are about to access a third-party service that “may not be approved for use by Amazon Security.”
What’s worse for Amazon employees is that the AI model can provide the correct solutions to several technical problems. So maybe Amazon should begin using it in its services like Microsoft?