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Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

(openai.com)
195 points meetpateltech | 2 comments | 12 Nov 25 14:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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vintagedave ◴[12 Nov 25 14:59 UTC] No.45901054[source]▶
Almost every comment (five) so far is against this: 'An incredibly cynical attempt at spin', 'How dare the New York Times demand access to our vault of everything-we-keep to figure out if we're a bunch of lying asses', etc.

In direct contrast: I fully agree with OpenAI here. We can have a more nuanced opinion than 'piracy to train AI is bad therefore refusing to share chats is bad', which sounds absurd but is genuinely how one of the other comments follows logic.

Privacy is paramount. People _trust_ that their chats are private: they ask sensitive questions, ones to do with intensely personal or private or confidential things. For that to be broken -- for a company to force users to have their private data accessed -- is vile.

The tech community has largely stood against this kind of thing when it's been invasive scanning of private messages, tracking user data, etc. I hope we can collectively be better (I'm using ethical terms for a reason) than the other replies show. We don't have to support OpenAI's actions in order to oppose the NYT's actions.

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1. glenstein ◴[12 Nov 25 15:11 UTC] No.45901188[source]▶
I suspect that many of those comments are from the Philosopher's Chair (aka bathroom), and are not aspiring to be literal answers but are ways of saying "OpenAI Bad". But to your point there should be privacy preserving ways to comply, like user anonymization, tailored searches and so on. It sounds like the NYT is proposing a random sampling of user data. But couldn't they instead do a random sampling of their most widely read articles, for positive hits, rather than reviewing content on a case by case basis?
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2. vintagedave ◴[12 Nov 25 15:50 UTC] No.45901632[source]▶
I hadn't heard of the philosopher's chair before, but I laughed :) Yes, I think those views were one-sided (OpenAI Bad) without thinking through other viewpoints.

IMO we can have multiple views over multiple companies and actions. And the sort of discussions I value here on HN are ones where people share insight, thought, show some amount of deeper thinking. I wanted to challenge for that with my comment.

_If_ we agree the NYT even has a reason to examine chats -- and I think even that should be where the conversation is -- I agree that there should be other ways to achieve it without violating privacy.