The reason Apple is banning the use of ChatGPT for employees is not for fear of non-work related searches. Apple wants to prevent confidential information from coming into the possession of OpenAI. This is reported by The Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI stores all interactions between users and ChatGPT. This is done in order to train the chatbot again. But the conversations can also be viewed by moderators to see if the terms and services are not violated.
Apple fears that employees will use ChatGPT, for example, to improve their code or to further develop ideas. That information can then fall into the hands of a competing tech company. Apple also warns its employees against using GitHub’s AI programming assistant Copilot.
Apple follows the example of others
In April, OpenAI added a feature to ChatGPT to disable chat history, so your conversations won’t be used to train the model. But with that option turned off, conversations are still stored for 30 days and can also be viewed by moderators.
Apple is not alone in banning ChatGPT. Previously, JP Morgan, Amazon and Verizon have already decided not to allow the use of the chatbot in the workplace, for the same reason as Apple.
