The Privacy Paradox: LLMs and Memorization (4/16)

Despite the uplifting advancements in the field of AI, especially with Large Language Models (LLMs), the memorization problem might make you hesitating yet to use them in your daily lives presumably due to the privacy concerns.

Higher Quality, More Memorization, Worse Privacy

You must have had several tests as students so far. How did you prepare for them? Presumably you simply memorized the material as much as possible. Unfortunately, one of the most widely used evaluation method of AI models is just the same one that evaluated you in schools — getting the score as much as they get it right. Of course they take the same strategy with you. In other words, AI models memorize training datasets and pretend to understand the task. Although there were so many research efforts to solve this problem, it is thoroughly proven that they do memorize what they see during training process.

The Double-Edged Sword

The memorization problem of LLMs represents a double-edged sword. On one hand, they provide powerful assistance, greatly improving your productivity. On the other hand. they pose a threat to your privacy. They could even use your information to assist other clients, which is definitely undesirable situation. Then do we have to keep LLMs a bay?

Synthetic Data As Your Secret Keeper

The solution can be found in synthetic data. It resembles your real data but is never going to tell your secrets, allowing you to safely utilize AI models.