OpenAI Chief Executive Officer, Sam Altman, has cautioned that user conversations with the company’s AI chatbot, ChatGPT, are not currently protected under any legal confidentiality laws and could be used in court proceedings.

Speaking on the ‘This Past Weekend’ podcast hosted by comedian Theo Von, Altman raised concerns about the deeply personal nature of information users, particularly young people, share with the chatbot.

“People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT,” Altman said. “Young people especially use it as a therapist, a life coach; having these relationship problems and [asking] ‘what should I do?’”

Unlike interactions with lawyers, doctors, or therapists—which are protected under legal privilege—AI conversations do not enjoy such protections, Altman noted.

“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, whatever. And we haven’t figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT,” he said.

Altman warned that in the absence of established legal protections, sensitive exchanges with AI tools could be subpoenaed.

“If you go talk to ChatGPT about the most sensitive stuff and then there’s a lawsuit or whatever, we could be required to produce that,” he explained. “And that’s a real problem.”

He called for urgent steps to bridge the privacy gap in AI interactions:
“I think that’s very screwed up. I think we should have the same concept of privacy for your conversations with AI that we do with a therapist or whatever, and no one had to think about that even a year ago.”

(Guardian)