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Sometimes when watching this headlong race to AI, you might wonder why?
Why spend so many millions, billions, (trillions?) of dollars on building
data centers? Why risk the entire economy, and why go into so much debt?
These folks obviously think different. But it occurs to me that there is one perspective that most people are not seeing.
Cloud AI companies are gaining real intelligence from you by trading artificial intelligence back in return.
The cloud computers take your ideas, your questions, your real life problems, feed them into models, and return partially baked code, probabilistic answers, and hallucinated lies in return. Sure, a lot of it is useful, but it is artificial, and occasionally harmful.
Oh, you don't think they are storing everything you type into those boxes forever and ever? I strongly suspect they are. This is the gold they are mining, and spending so much to obtain. All the world's private thoughts and desires and plans and hopes and dreams are flooding into their data centers at record pace. For later analysis.
Take the story of Josh which you can watch on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2fv664Ndf4. It's the story of a man who used AI to write a report he should have written, and then gets caught in court, where reportedly 350 pages of his entire ChatGPT history is read into the record.
Now, it doesn't explicitly say where this came from. Did they just open his personal account and copy everything out? Did they send a subpoena to the AI company for the details? Not sure. But anyone who knows how these things work would be shocked (shocked!) to learn that AI companies around the world are just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It is best to go into the agreement of using AI with your eyes wide open, and just assume that everything you type into the prompt is stored somewhere forever.
For example, ChatGPT's privacy policy states that they will retain your personal data until you delete it, in which case they will either delete it within 30 days, or de-identify and disassociate the data from you and use it to improve their models.
By that point, it doesn't matter if the prompt you use can be traced back to you. The gold is the prompt, the idea, the human intelligence or human experience behind it, which allows them to improve their mimicry of humanity and eliminate dependence on it.
Solution: run your own models locally so you own all your own data. How? I hope to blog more on this topic in the future as my friend and I have been recently working on Project Jarvis.
