Samsung Electronics Co. has decided to limit its employee use of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Google Bard and Bing, in light of security concerns. This has caused a setback for the growth of AI technology in the workplace. The South Korean company issued an internal memo to staff members at one of its biggest departments, highlighting worries that data sent to such virtual assistant platforms could be stored externally and leaked out to other users.
Apart from Samsung, other significant corporations, such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., have also chosen to put restrictions on the use of ChatGPT, while Italy temporarily barred it due to privacy issues. On the other hand, OpenAI, a company that focuses on researching AI, had caused a surge in interest when its chatbot service was made available in February.
In the newly implemented policy, the use of generative AI systems are banned on all devices owned by the company, including computers, tablets, phones, and networks. This rule does not apply to devices sold to consumers, such as Windows laptops and Android smartphones. The company is also demanding that staff members who use the AI tools for personal purposes are to abstain from sharing sensitive company or personal data that could reveal its intellectual property. Violating this can result in harsh punishments, like employee termination.
Notably, last month, Samsung engineers had a mishap wherein corporate source code was accidently uploaded to ChatGPT, as mentioned in the memo. With this in mind, HQ is currently forming a secure setting to ensure that generative AI can be used safely and productively. They are also working on blocking any leakage of important corporate information. ChatGPT had already added an “incognito” option to conceal conversations from being used to train AI models.
In the meantime, the company is creating new internal AI tools for translation and summarizing documents, as well as for software development. Additionally, Samsung is also conducting a survey to analyze the use of AI tools in the organization, with 65% of the respondents pointing out that they are concerned about the associated security risks.
Therefore, it is evident that Samsung is taking ample precautions to safeguard its information by prohibiting the use of external AI tools and gradually introducing its own virtual assistant platforms. Although this is currently slowing down the AI utilization, it can have the potential to enhance the productivity of the company.
