Is It Safe to Use ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a popular large language model (LLM) that people worldwide use to generate content, answer questions, and streamline business processes. In this guide, we will examine the AI service more closely and answer the question: Is it safe to use ChatGPT?

The ability for AI systems like ChatGPT to generate, improve, and edit content offers many benefits: You can ask it to quickly generate a letter, write a cute poem for a loved one, help you build a website, or even write a school essay! With so much power at your fingertips, it is crucial to understand ChatGPT better and know when it is safe to use.

When using ChatGPT, you should be aware of important privacy, accuracy, and ethical considerations. The same applies to other AI text generators such as Anthropic’s Claude or Meta’s Llama. This guide explains the potential risks associated with ChatGPT so you can better understand when you should (and shouldn’t) use the platform.

What are the privacy risks of using ChatGPT?

Data privacy is one of the primary concerns when considering whether it is safe to use ChatGPT. This is because it is highly likely that the information you enter into ChatGPT will be used to train the AI further. As a result, all the information you enter could become part of its knowledge base.

This results in several risk factors. Firstly, it means that OpenAI and its staff could be privy to any information you enter. If OpenAI mismanages user-inputted data, that data could potentially be breached by hackers or accidentally leaked.

ChatGPT could even plagiarise your words and give them to somebody else to use as their own. This might not matter if you are making a shopping list, but it might be extremely dangerous if you are a professional novelist.

What should I avoid sharing with ChatGPT to protect my privacy

Now that you are aware of the privacy risks associated with ChatGPT let’s look at the type of data and information you should always avoid supplying to ChatGPT:

Personal Information

You must never share personal details such as your name, address, phone number, passwords, social security numbers, passport details, bank or other financial details, or any other personally identifiable information (PII) with ChatGPT.

While the platform is designed to be secure, there is an underlying possibility that the information you input can be stored and used for training. This means it could potentially resurface in future interactions.

This could open the door to severe privacy and security risks because you don’t want ChatGPT to answer questions about you with accurate personal information accidentally if asked to do so at some point in the future. This could result in identity theft or fraud.

Business Data and Intellectual Property

Business data is another class of data that you have to protect. For this reason, you need to be extremely careful about the types of business data you input into ChatGPT. Specifically, never entering sensitive business information, consumer data, or intellectual property is essential.

The data you provide to ChatGPT is not private and it could be used to train the AI. This means that your business’s information, including any intellectual property, could be shared with other users who ask about it.

As a result, anybody using ChatGPT in a professional environment could inadvertently cause unintended data leaks, leading to compliance problems.

For example, if you enter consumers’ details into ChatGPT to speed up data analysis or other purposes, you could inadvertently violate consumer data protection laws like GDPR or CCPA. Under these circumstances, data leaks caused by ChatGPT could eventually result in fines.

Always check with your employer before use

Due to the privacy concerns surrounding ChatGPT, anybody using ChatGPT to handle confidential, sensitive, or private business data must check that they have their employer’s full permission before doing so.

Many organizations have strict guidelines about data sharing and using a third-party platform like ChatGPT without prior approval. If you violate company policies, you could ultimately be disciplined, lose your job, or face personal liability for the data leaks you caused.

How accurate is ChatGPT, and is it reliable?

The next big problem with large language models like ChatGPT is accuracy. Although ChatGPT is trained to produce well-written and human-like responses, it’s important to understand that it is prone to hallucinations. Hallucination is the technical term used to describe incorrect or misleading answers or content generated by ChatGPT.

Unfortunately, ChatGPT is highly prone to generating this kind of information. ChatGPT is known to hallucinate inaccurate dates, places, names, and many other important facts when asked to generate content. As a user, this can be very frustrating because when ChatGPT “hallucinates,” it does so with absolute confidence about the facts it made up.

It is unsafe to use ChatGPT to generate factual content you do not already understand or know the answers to because you cannot tell when it has told you a fib. One option is to do your research and fact-check each statement yourself.

Better yet, we would advise using ChatGPT only to help with content that you already understand intimately and will easily spot mistakes in. This will ensure that when you proofread the content, you know it is full of hallucinations and is not fit for purpose unless facts, figures, and other precise details have been corrected.

When do you need to fact-check ChatGPT?

Suppose you use ChatGPT to write poetry, stories, letters, and other content generations that do not contain facts, statistics, or other precise details that could be prone to hallucinations. In that case, you are probably OK with using ChatGPT without fact-checking.

However, anything containing factual research or information must be verified. ChatGPT’s responses are based on patterns learned from data, but the AI does not (currently) have any fact-checking mechanisms built in, meaning it could provide bogus data.

You might incorrectly assume that because ChatGPT was trained from the Internet, textbooks, and other human-produced literature containing real facts, it will be good at providing correct answers. This is true to some degree. ChatGPT can answer many questions correctly.

Unfortunately, however, using ChatGPT is still a bit random, which means you are playing the fact lottery every time you use it. Ultimately, you can’t trust ChatGPT not to hallucinate, meaning it could land you in hot water if you don’t understand (or carefully check) the content it has generated for you.

The important thing to remember is that AI can produce plausible-sounding but factually incorrect information. Users must understand and verify any content created using ChatGPT, especially for professional or academic purposes.

Professional and academic repercussions

Relying on ChatGPT to produce content or answer questions without verifying each piece of information can have serious consequences.

Using ChatGPT professionally can damage credibility, lead to poor decision-making, or even legal liability.

The same is true when using ChatGPT as a study aid. Leaning on ChatGPT to help with writing or editing an essay or fixing grammar issues is all good as long as you are fully aware of the topic and can comprehend everything in the text to ensure it has your voice and is completely accurate.

Students who cheat at school by asking ChatGPT to generate complete responses or essays will almost certainly find themselves in hot water. Hallucinations inevitably lead to inaccuracies that result in nonsensical essays or research papers—and bad grades.

Using ChatGPT in this way will severely undermine the quality of your work and will negatively affect your academic experience and ability to learn.

Why it is easy to spot AI-generated content

Another dead giveaway that makes it unsafe (or at least a bad idea) to use ChatGPT is its writing style. ChatGPT’s highly distinctive style often overuses certain words and sentence structures.

This makes it easy for human readers – and AI detection tools – to check whether content was produced by AI. Below, we have included some of the writing style choices that make it easy to tell when ChatGPT was used:

Repetitive phrasing

ChatGPT tends to start sentences in specific ways time and time again. This means that when you use ChatGPT, your writing will seem cheesy and like all the other writing that was generated by ChatGPT. For example, if you ask it to write you a story, or worse, you leverage ChatGPT to write chapters for a novel – the content will be hugely repetitive, stale, and boring.

The solution? 

We advise thinking of ChatGPT as a writing partner or editor. Teaming up with ChatGPT can help you brainstorm, perform SEO research, and do many other functional tasks. It can also help to iron out kinks in your writing, improve sentence structure, help reduce the passive voice, and iron out grammar mistakes.

However, using ChatGPT as a reliable writing aid will require you to do much of the heavy lifting! You will still need to write your own essays, song lyrics, stories, articles – or whatever else you are writing. If you let ChatGPT do too much, the content will be easy to spot and substandard.

Risk of detection

Another reason to be cautious about using ChatGPT is when you are writing content for public consumption, or that will be used for other official purposes. If the content you produce or publish can easily be attributed as AI-generated text, it could undermine trust and lead to consequences – especially in academic or professional settings where original work is expected.

Is it safer to use ChatGPT with a VPN?

Many users wonder if a VPN can make it safer to use ChatGPT. This depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Although VPNs are advertised as privacy services, they can’t stop ChatGPT from collecting the data you input for training purposes. A VPN also doesn’t stop OpenAI from knowing who you are, because you have to log into a verified ChatGPT account to use the service.

A VPN also can’t prevent your data from being shared internally by OpenAI staff as part of its ongoing efforts to improve the AI model or to check that your user inputs haven’t violated its terms of service.

So, what can a VPN help with?

A VPN is useful if you want to prevent local networks, ISPs, or government agencies from seeing that you are accessing ChatGPT.

For example, if you are living in a country where ChatGPT is unavailable because it has been banned or restricted, you may want to regain access with a VPN. The encryption provided by a reliable VPN for ChatGPT will allow you to use the service without being tracked by your ISP or the government.

That said, it is important to note that many VPNs have already been blocked by ChatGPT. This means you must do your research carefully to pick a VPN that works. Otherwise, you may find that you can’t log in or use ChatGPT.

FAQ: Is it safe to use ChatGPT?