ChatGPT: Business Use May Cause Loss Of Trade Secret Protections, Waiver Of Privilege, And Other Harms

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Law Firm: León Cosgrove Jiménez, LLP
• Subject Matter: Corporate/Commercial Law, Intellectual Property, M&A/Private Equity, Trade Secrets
• Author: Ms Caroline K. Gorman
• Published date: 03 May 2023

The use of ChatGPT and similar generative language models provide stark risks to trade secret protection, and organizations should be vigilant that no employee is inadvertently sharing trade secrets with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is an AI which can be used to generate text of any kind.

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot (or generative language model) developed by OpenAI which uses large language models to generate text in response to user prompts. ChatGPT has over 100 million users by January 2023.

ChatGPT may be used to generate:

• Advertising copy
• Headlines
• Essays
• Outlines
• Quiz questions based on a general topic
• Summaries in any style
• Dialogue

ChatGPT can also edit code for errors and bugs, or edit a written document for grammatical, logical and syntactical errors. It has many, many uses.

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, will soon begin charging a $42 monthly fee for ChatGPT Professional, which offers unlimited use and a faster response time. OpenAI will also soon offer an API (Application Programming Interface) for the artificial intelligence chatbot. This API will allow other programs to integrate ChatGPT into their application. For example, ChatGPT could be integrated into a word processing program to generate introductions or provide editing.

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT, and other generative language models, are trained on a large amount of text. The current ChatGPT was trained before its release and is not currently directly absorbing new text. However, current ChatGPT models indirectly absorb new text through user questions. For example, a user could put in the outlines of an internal memo and ask for ChatGPT to generate the full memo. Or a user could upload a vendor contract or non-disclosure agreement and ask ChatGPT to provide edits.

Later models of ChatGPT will likely include the ability to train the program for specific uses by uploading text. One could, for example, use ChatGPT to generate annual reviews by uploading previous monthly reviews, or to generate research summaries by uploading the underlying research. Other programs already offer the ability to upload one's own data to ChatGPT to produce more specific responses.

Any data entered in ChatGPT, directly or indirectly, is no longer private. It can be used by ChatGPT to respond to future questions or even for other purposes by the AI creators.

In other words, ChatGPT remembers what is provided to it and ChatGPT (or whatever API or large language model is used) may produce that information in response to other queries by other users. This potentially carries risk if the information provided to ChatGPT contains confidential or trade secret information. The user may be inadvertently publishing information...