The Download: AI privacy risks, and cleaning up shipping

One of the biggest stories in tech this year has been the rise of large language models (LLMs). These are AI models that produce text a human might have written--sometimes so convincingly they have tricked people into thinking they are sentient. These models' power comes from troves of publicly available human-created text that has been hoovered from the internet. If you've posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world's most popular LLMs. My colleague Melissa Heikkilä, our AI reporter, recently started to wonder what data these models might have on her--and how it could be misused. A bruising experience a decade ago left her paranoid about sharing personal details online, so she put OpenAI's GPT-3 to the test to see what it "knows" about her.