Sam Altman just gave the best reason not to trust ChatGPT

Sam Altman, the face of ChatGPT, recently made an excellent argument for not using ChatGPT or any cloud-based AI chatbot in favor of a LLM running on your PC instead.

In speaking on Theo Von’s podcast (as unearthed by PCMag.com) Altman pointed out that, right now, OpenAI retains everything you tell it — which, as Altman notes, can be everything from a casual conversation to deep, meaningful discussions about personal topics. (Whether you should be disclosing your deep dark secrets to ChatGPT is another topic entirely.)

Yes, OpenAI keeps your conversations private. But there are no legal protections requiring it to anonymize or indemnify your chats. Put another way, if a court orders OpenAI to disclose what you’ve told it, it probably will. Imagine divorce proceedings where the defendant had multiple chats asking ChatGPT if they should have an affair with a coworker, or something worse.

“I think we will certainly need a legal or a policy framework for AI,” Altman told Von, a comedian and podcaster named Theodor Capitani von Kurnatowski III who uses the stage name Theo Von on a clip posted to Twitter.

“People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT,” Altman said. “People use it, young people, especially use it as a therapist, a life coach, having these relationship problems, what should I do? And right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there’s legal privilege for it. There’s doctor-patient confidentiality, there’s legal confidentiality, and we haven’t figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT.

“If you go talk to chat about your most sensitive stuff, and then there’s like, a lawsuit or whatever, like, we could be required to produce that,” Altman added.

When people talk about running a local LLM on your PC, privacy is often the top selling point. You can run local chatbot apps like GPT4All on a PC with a GPU or an NPU, and more models are arriving all the time.

Naturally, you might want to save the output of a local chatbot on your PC. But you don’t have to, and any potentially weird or incriminating conversations can be instantly deleted.

(If your PC’s contents are searched or subpoenaed, however, you won’t have access to them. Don’t think about defying a court order or warrant to search your PC by deleting those chats, either — that’s illegal.)

Running a local AI chatbot on your PC is perfectly legal and you can tell it anything you want. Just consider a real, human, licensed therapist for the best results.