AI is becoming used increasing more in different areas of people’s lives. Moreover, the threat of AI has been a prominent topic for years now. But how does it affect people’s privacy online?
A recent scandal arose regarding the Lee Luda AI chatbot made by the South Korean company Scatter Lab. Its parent company Kakao owns KakaoTalk which is the most popular messaging app in South Korea. It began in 2016 when Scatter Lab launched the app Science of Love. Users submit their conversations to the app from KakaoTalk and receive advice from AI about whether the other person likes you based on how quickly they respond, the language and emojis used etc. Returning back to the AI chatbot, supposedly 10 billion conversation logs were used to train it. These were acquired from people’s conversations which were submitted to the app Science of Love. However, the users were not aware that their conversations would be used for the chatbot.
The chatbot was launched on Facebook too and received 750,000 users within a few days. However, the scandal began when users were receiving inappropriate messages from the bot which were on the topics of LGBTQ+, racism, sexism, use of abusive language, sexually explicit content, etc. The bot was also revealing private information about other people such as their name, nickname, home address, and back account number. Scatter Lab got a lot of backlash and Lee Luda was removed from Facebook.
In the end, the scandal was resolved with an apology from Scatter Lab saying that the AI chatbot was not complete and they “failed to remove some personal information depending on the context.” There was an investigation done into the company’s usage of private data. However, the laws and regulations on AI seemed to have been lacking which resulted in little to no consequences. There is a lot which can be taken from this incident. First is that users should be more careful about their own private data. Second is that AI is evolving rapidly nowadays to the point that law enforcement isn’t adapting quickly enough to keep up with the advancement.
Sources:
https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/scatterlab-lee-luda-chatbot-kakaotalk-ai-privacy.html
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2021/02/133_302715.html