AI Chatbots are relatively old by tech standards, but the newest crop -- led by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard -- are vastly more capable than their ancestors, not always for positive reasons. The recent explosion in AI development has already created concerns around misinformation, disinformation, plagiarism and machine-generated malware. What problems might generative AI pose for the privacy of the average internet user? In order to replicate human-like interactions, AI chatbots are trained on mass amounts of data, a significant portion of which is derived from repositories like Common Crawl. As the name suggests, Common Crawl has amassed years and petabytes worth of data simply from crawling and scraping the open web. "These models are training on large data sets of publicly available data on the internet," Megha Srivastava, PhD student at Stanford's computer science department and former AI resident with Microsoft Research, said.

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you have clicked on Add to Basket. T-800, eat your endoskeleton lubricant pump out: I'm talking about the new wave of e-commerce virtual assistants. It seems that you are not the only one to have noticed that responding to the "Do you need help?" popup while shopping online was about as productive as telling Eliza about your mother in 1992.