Newsletter issue #3 - How your team can now use ChatGPT without leaking your private data

With ChatGPT, Bing and Bard being readily available to your employees, it is imperative that they are trained in the secure and responsible use of generative AI tools.

In November I was invited to speak about Generative AI and take part in a panel discussion with an audience of 120 business owners, CFOs and Chartered Accountants.

During the panel discussion I asked the room; “How many of you are regularly using ChatGPT or similar Generative AI tools in your business?” Less than ten people raised their hands!

During Q&A the biggest question we had from the audience clearly demonstrated why adoption is currently so low (in particular with finance professionals) - people understand the potential productivity benefits, but fear that their data will be used to train the AI model, and inadvertently become publicly available.

This is a real, and very justified concern! 

By default, the free or even paid ChatGPT Plus version of ChatGPT will train their model on your business data. You can select to turn this off in the settings, but as a consequence you also lose your Chat history. Or, you can fill out this form to request your data to not be used to train the AI models.

Last week OpenAI released ChatGPT Teams, a plan suitable for SME businesses. It gives much greater control over data privacy and security, and is only a small increase in price from ChatGPT Plus. We switched our Time Under Tension accounts to ChatGPT Teams over the weekend.

For larger businesses there is also the ChatGPT Enterprise plan, which is more expensive but offers even greater control over data such as SSO and SOC 2 compliance.

Of course there are alternatives, such as ChatGPT via Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Bing, Google Bard and the newly announced Amazon Q. Each come with their own intricacies about data handling. 

For now, our preference and recommendation is ChatGPT with GPT-4, and the easiest way for an SME to sign-up for this and be assured that your data is not being used to train an AI model is with the new Teams plan; https://openai.com/chatgpt/team

“Companies that help their employees and customers understand the nuances of privacy and security will empower their users to be more confident and innovative in their use of this technology“ - Forrester, 2023

If you are interested in training for your teams, to help them safely get the most from Generative AI tools, please get in touch: hello@timeundertension.ai 

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