BBC
"I'm sorry but I would not buy this carpet, and pale blue won't match the color of the walls. Just a thought."
This story is in connexion with the tragedy that hit British Columbia recently. What strikes me, here, is what the story refers to, if you read between the lines: it says, in essence, that the AI tool (and the company behind it) monitors the use of various accounts (including its own AI service, I suppose), by users. And it analyses what the user is doing online with his (or her) various accounts to draw conclusions as to whether it (the AI tool and the company behind) ought to alert the police or not as to what that person is getting up to in the privacy of his (or her) home.
Some people may find this unsurprising and inevitable - welcome even. After all, there is more and more pressure on the providers of IT services to monitor content and alert the authorities to what most sane people find deeply objectionable, and rightly so - such as child pornography, pedophilia, planning serious crime including murder, and so on. If those companies are accountable, they have to monitor content. But does it apply to content shared on online forums, and websites such as Facebook, or does it also apply to content gathered by a private individual for his (or her) personal use?
I do not use AI very much. I have used the Google tool, which comes with the search engine (called 'AI mode'). I have used it, among other things, to look into legal information (in connexion with property) and medical data (in connexion with health issues). It can be useful and save time, although it can also get it all wrong. What I am arriving at is the following question: The AI tool builds on earlier questions you have asked the bot, as I have noticed, in order to answer your next question better; does this mean that, somewhere on a server, there sits a profile or dossier comprising all the information available about the user's online searches to date, as known to the AI bot, hence to the company running it (here, Google)? In other words, who has access to this online dossier? How is the data protected?
The inescapable conclusion is that, more than ever, privacy is dead. The search engine, AI-enabled or not, knows everything about you: it knows whether you need a new carpet for the sitting-room in your house or not, and when you bought it, and what color it was.
In fact, all of the online companies make a profile of their users, customers or clients, ChatGPT and other AI tools do so as well. It can be annoying in as much as the system makes decisions on basis of a profile that could never, even in principle, encompass the irreducible complexity of human beings. Even in AI systems like ChatGPT, the profile restricts its answers since it is trying to better serve the user.
Furthermore, each provider could have its own be-spoke data stores. The profile could be linked to the IP address or the email address or a bit of both. "I have nothing to hide - as everyone says!" - but I still find it unsettling. In principle, the profile could be integrated with the content of emails, text messages, phone calls etc.
Can the data be hacked?
In principle, yes, hackers could also obtain multiple, overlapping profiles of an individual, thus creating a more complete mosaic of that person. With certain government-records, such as marriage, children, parents, they could target additional persons...It is scary though, also because AI will make the use of data far easier.
One can imagine people confiding in the online tool or bot, talking about intimate problems, their fight with depression, etc., and all of this is logged, recorded, stored, etc. It is a massive invasion of privacy. For example, profiles of one's purchases are tracked in a quite crude manner. It is rather stupid, in fact. One buys, let us say, a new CPU for one's computer, then, for weeks on end, one gets suggestions for new computers.
Or one looks at this or that house to help a relative or friend buy a house somewhere. Then one gets ads for real estate up and down the country, so, one can tell the data is being collected and recycled. But it is the next step to collate all the data and consolidate it into a single profile of the user, which is far more sinister.
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Some had identified the suspect's usage of the AI tool as an indication of real-world violence and encouraged leaders to alert authorities, the US outlet reported.
But, it said, leaders of the company decided not to do so.
In a statement, a spokesperson for OpenAI said: "In June 2025, we proactively identified an account associated with this individual [Jesse Van Rootselaar] via our abuse detection and enforcement efforts, which include automated tools and human investigations to identify misuses of our models in furtherance of violent activities."
