Was using my SO’s laptop, I had been talking (not searching, or otherwise typing) about some VPN solutions for my homelab, and had the curiosity to use the new big copilot button and ask what it can do. The beginning of this context was actually me asking if it can turn off my computer for me (it cannot) and I ask this.
Very unnerved, I hate to be so paranoid to think that it actually picked up on the context of me talking, but again: SO’s laptop, so none of my technical search history to pull off of.
Is it possible that your chain of questions is very similar to other “paranoid” users who inevitably question copilot about privacy, so this is a learned response?
I’ll pull the rest of the context when she’s back in town, I doubt she’s used it more so it should be saved still. She looked at me when this typed out and said “you’re fucking with me right?”. I am still just as shocked, I wish I was fucking around and I have no other explaination how it would remotely key onto saying this given the previous interactions.
Absolutely amazing.
My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.
I want to believe that is the explaination, I really would’ve expected at least a hardcoded “features and capability” response, or for it to be more than a neutered chatGPT that im sure neither of us are going to use
MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.
Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.
The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.
I never needed Bing to open up in a side panel, I’m not sure why I would want that now
They bought OpenAI and all, why aren’t they using the most cutting edge from them? Or is it just severely lobotomized with some preprompt to the point I still would rather open up chatGPT
Looks to me like not audio tracking but that u somehow inadvertently triggered microsofts privacy training they have given to copilot. Im guessing the ai was being too vocal about privacy and microsoft wanted to tame it and get it to downplay etc.
ChatGPT has a short but distinct history of encouraging paranoia in people who use it.
Asked for help with a coding issue, ChatGPT wrote a long, rambling and largely nonsensical answer that included the phrase “Let’s keep the line as if AI in the room”.
I have to credit to the novelty of the technology, there’s certainly a reason I’m wanting to self host models, my concern really is with what data is being used, and how these models are being trusted.
My goal is to contribute the least useable data to the likes of OpenAI “in the puruit of AGI” because it will inevitably become as did MS Tay did, especially if something can change on their end and suddenly have it spitting out garbage for users who may be potentially at risk of bad advice or actually paranoid.
That also doesn’t mean I havent and wont use chatGPT, it certainly has been a useful tool, knowing its limitations, but OpenAI has their head in the clouds and it only leads to greed in pursuit of an end goal. /Imho
I think AI is humanized and otherwise designed so that people will feel encouraged to give private data to it. The Kagi Corporation wrote about this in their manifesto. In reality, giving your data to open AI is just as unsafe as typing in a personal search query into Google or Bing. But by changing the context, it feels like you’re talking to a friend or a person you met at a bus stop.
AI Bros always say “it’s just a tool” as a sort of thought terminating cliche (note: this wasn’t intended to be a dig at your comment). Guns are a tool too. I wouldn’t want the richest corporations in the United States to personally own the most powerful missile systems, and in terms of AI, that’s kind of where we are.
What. The. Fuck. Please tell me this is satire. Please.
It’s not real. There’s other ways that answer would come up. We only see the ones that seem weird because boring answers don’t get posted.
There’s a real risk of survivorship bias here. Somebody asking about a car gets that and thinks nothing of it. A privacy minded person, however, would find it odd. And being the kind of person concerned about what could have been the cause considered the prior conversation.
I’m not saying its an unreasonable concern or technically not feasible. It’s just not how the LLM’s tend to work.
Id consider it more likely to be a bug, or general inquiries like you said, or that SO had a bunch of documents locally that reference privacy or browsing history (anytime really) that MS could have used as a kind of “here’s more about the person asking you a question”
A privacy minded person probably wouldn’t use these tools to begin with tbh, they would likely run their own LLM instead.
I will tomorrow, I understand where the skeptisism comes from, I still very much doubt that it is listening, I do have my Firefox account on her laptop, but regardless it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth
Edit: this is no more than about 6 messages into using it, first few were garbage my SO tried out, then I was curious of its actual utility, not really coming at it to find a problem
I believe theyre linking Metadata. Regardless of my VPN, the ads that slip through are clearly all linked between device’s so it’s my belief that they’re gathering and tracking data to link sources based on hardware info. I use randomized MAC, client spoofers, VPN, adblock dns, everything, and they’re still able to link my devices based on hardware data.
I believe it uses your browser history to gauge your interests and bases its responses partly on the type of stuff you participate in repeatedly.
So if for example you browse websites related to privacy more than anything else, it takes that into account and gets all creepy about it.
