We saw these same fears with the release of Gmail. Why would you trust your
email to
Google?!! Aren't they going to train their spam filters on all your data? Aren't they going to sell it, or use it to sell you ads?
Corporations constantly put their most sensitive data in 3rd party tools. The executive in the article was probably copying his company strategy from Google docs.
Yes, there are good reasons for concern, but the power of the tool is simply too great to ignore.
Banning these tools will go the same way as prohibition did in the US, people will simply ignore it until it becomes too absurd to maintain and too profitable to not participate in.
Companies which are able to operate without these fears will move faster, grow more quickly, and ultimately challenge companies restricted to operate without.
Now I think the article should be a wake-up call for OpenAI. Messaging around what is and what is not used for training could be improved. Corporate accounts for Chat with clearer privacy policies would be great and warnings that, yes, LLMs do memorize data and you should treat anything you put into a free product on the web as fair game for someone's training algorithm.