Samsung bans employees from using ChatGPT following leaks

Korean electronics giant Samsung is banning generative AI tools like ChatGPT following internal source code leaks from its engineering teams.

South Korean electronics company Samsung has reportedly banned its employees from using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bing, and Google Bard following leaks from its engineering teams leaking sensitive information into OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

According to a memo received by Bloomberg, the company conducted an internal survey, claiming that 65% of its respondents believe that generative AI poses a security risk for the company.

An internal Samsung memo reads: “Interest in generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT has been growing internally and externally,” Samsung claimed. “While this interest focuses on the usefulness and efficiency of these platforms, there are also growing concerns about security risks presented by generative AI.”

Samsung is not the only entity voicing some discontent toward AI as of late, an open letter was penned to the wider tech community to halt AI development, while the “Godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton resigned from Google to warn others about the dangers that AI could potentially pose in the future.

Samsung’s new rules state a companywide ban from using AI tools on company-owned devices and networks. The company also asked employees not to divulge any sensitive company information to tools such as ChatGPT, as scrubbing logs and data from the services could be incredibly difficult. However, ChatGPT does offer an “incognito” mode where the conversation will not be used for AI model training in the future.

Samsung is also developing its own AI tools

Samsung

Ironically, Samsung is already developing its own AI tools, from software to other things such as Bixby, which appears in its smartphone lineup. It’s not expected that this ban will directly impact any consumers. It’s likely that we might even see Samsung develop its own generative AI solutions, as the tech industry’s reckoning with the advent of advanced artificial intelligence continues.