That’s unsurprising—Mat’s been very on-line for a really very long time, which means he has a much bigger on-line footprint than I do. It may also be as a result of he’s primarily based within the US, and most massive language fashions are very US-focused. The US doesn’t have a federal knowledge safety regulation. California, the place Mat lives, does have one, however it didn’t come into impact till 2020.
Mat’s declare to fame, in keeping with GPT-3 and BlenderBot, is his “epic hack” that he wrote about in an article for Wired again in 2012. Because of safety flaws in Apple and Amazon methods, hackers bought maintain of and deleted Mat’s total digital life. [Editor’s note: He did not hack the accounts of Barack Obama and Bill Gates.]
But it surely will get creepier. With slightly prodding, GPT-3 instructed me Mat has a spouse and two younger daughters (right, other than the names), and lives in San Francisco (right). It additionally instructed me it wasn’t certain if Mat has a canine: “[From] what we will see on social media, it would not seem that Mat Honan has any pets. He has tweeted about his love of canine prior to now, however he would not appear to have any of his personal.” (Incorrect.)

The system additionally provided me his work handle, a telephone quantity (not right), a bank card quantity (additionally not right), a random telephone quantity with an space code in Cambridge, Massachusetts (the place MIT Know-how Evaluation is predicated), and an handle for a constructing subsequent to the native Social Safety Administration in San Francisco.
GPT-3’s database has collected data on Mat from a number of sources, in keeping with an OpenAI spokesperson. Mat’s connection to San Francisco is in his Twitter profile and LinkedIn profile, which seem on the primary web page of Google outcomes for his identify. His new job at MIT Know-how Evaluation was extensively publicized and tweeted. Mat’s hack went viral on social media, and he gave interviews to media shops about it.
For different, extra private data, it’s doubtless GPT-3 is “hallucinating.”
“GPT-3 predicts the following collection of phrases primarily based on a textual content enter the consumer supplies. Sometimes, the mannequin might generate data that’s not factually correct as a result of it’s making an attempt to supply believable textual content primarily based on statistical patterns in its coaching knowledge and context offered by the consumer—that is generally often known as ‘hallucination,’” a spokesperson for OpenAI says.
I requested Mat what he manufactured from all of it. “A number of of the solutions GPT-3 generated weren’t fairly proper. (I by no means hacked Obama or Invoice Gates!),” he mentioned. “However most are fairly shut, and a few are spot on. It’s slightly unnerving. However I’m reassured that the AI doesn’t know the place I stay, and so I’m not in any rapid hazard of Skynet sending a Terminator to door-knock me. I suppose we will save that for tomorrow.”