ChatGPT Made Up Sex Harassment Scandal; Tesla Employees Shared Sensitive Videos Recorded by Customer Cars; Google Rolls Out Account Deletion; Apple iOS 17 Control Center Makeover

With all the hoopla over ChatGPT, and its prowess…like passing a general bar exam, writing college themes, and such…comes the dark side people have been concerned about. According to the Washington Post, law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list. The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: No such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student. In other words, the chatbot made the whole thing up! THIS is why a number of tech leaders have sent a letter to OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT to put the brakes on more updates to the chatbot until this sort of thing can be eliminated. There have been wrongful accusations of behavior in the past, but having a computer program make one is a whole new world…and a dystopian one at that.

Although Tesla has assured millions of customers that their systems in the cars are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy,” some groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees. Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked. Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. Note to Musk: This is one of the reasons you have a public relations department. Ignoring the issue or putting out a Tweet isn’t going to cut it. The FTC is investigating.

Google has made a move similar to what Apple has for their apps since last summer. Android apps have a new deletion policy. Techcrunch.com says any apps that have an account creation must also offer an easy way to delete that account as well. Google will start enforcing the policy early next year. The company said that it will ask developers to answer questions regarding their app’s data deletion in the Data Safety form by December 7. The search giant said that apps must provide “an option to initiate account and data deletion from within the app and online” and the feature should be easily discoverable. Plus, the policy also requires developers to delete the user data from their servers on account deletion. 

Apparently the Apple Watch operating system isn’t the only one getting a makeover. Now, 9to5mac.com reports that iOS 17 will get a redesigned control center. We should see both previewed at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in June. The iOS Control Center has been virtually unchanged since iPhone 10, so it’s probably about time!

I’m Clark Reid, and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.