Your ChatGPT confessions aren’t private — and may end up in court, says CEO
Altman voiced concerns over how openly users, particularly younger ones, share personal and emotional details with the AI.
SHAH ALAM - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has issued a warning that conversations held with ChatGPT are not legally confidential and may be used as evidence in legal proceedings.
Speaking on the This Past Weekend podcast with comedian Theo Von, Altman voiced concerns over how openly users, particularly younger ones, share personal and emotional details with the AI.
“People talk about the most personal things in their lives to ChatGPT.
“Young people especially use it as a therapist, a life coach; having these relationship problems and asking ‘what should I do?,” Altman said.
He pointed out that, unlike discussions with medical professionals, lawyers, or counsellors, which were protected by legal confidentiality or privilege, no such protection currently exists for AI interactions.
“If you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there’s legal privilege for it. There’s doctor-patient confidentiality, there’s legal confidentiality, whatever and we haven’t figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT,” he added.
Altman said that without those safeguards, anything shared with the chatbot could potentially be accessed in legal cases.
“If you go talk to ChatGPT about the most sensitive stuff and then there’s a lawsuit, we could be required to produce that and that’s a real problem,” he said.
He called for urgent legal and ethical frameworks to bring privacy standards in AI up to par with human professionals.
Altman described the situation as deeply flawed, arguing that conversations with AI should be afforded the same level of privacy as those with a therapist, something, he noted, that few people even considered just a year ago.
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