OpenAI Privacy Filter is an open-weight model for detecting and redacting personally identifiable information (PII) in text with state-of-the-art accuracy
microsoft/presidio
An open-source framework for detecting, redacting, masking, and anonymizing sensitive data (PII) across text, images, and structured data. Supports NLP, pattern matching, and customizable pipelines.
Teen safety, freedom, and privacy
Explore OpenAI’s approach to balancing teen safety, freedom, and privacy in AI use.
PII-TRACE: Detecting Personal Data Before It Leaves a Device
Discover how PII-TRACE tests recurring PII detection in long multilingual conversations with a compact 0.6B local model.
Testing of detection tools for AI-generated text
Recent advances in generative pre-trained transformer large language models have emphasised the potential risks of unfair use of artificial intelligence (AI) generated content in an academic environment and intensified efforts in searching for solutions to detect such content. The paper examines the general functionality of detection tools for AI-generated text and evaluates them based on accuracy and error type analysis. Specifically, the study seeks to answer research questions about whether existing detection tools can reliably differentiate between human-written text and ChatGPT-generated text, and whether machine translation and content obfuscation techniques affect the detection of AI-generated text. The research covers 12 publicly available tools and two commercial systems (Turnitin and PlagiarismCheck) that are widely used in the academic setting. The researchers conclude that the available detection tools are neither accurate nor reliable and have a main bias towards classifying the output as human-written rather than detecting AI-generated text. Furthermore, content obfuscation techniques significantly worsen the performance of tools. The study makes several significant contributions. First, it summarises up-to-date similar scientific and non-scientific efforts in the field. Second, it presents the result of one of the most comprehensive tests conducted so far, based on a rigorous research methodology, an original document set, and a broad coverage of tools. Third, it discusses the implications and drawbacks of using detection tools for AI-generated text in academic settings.
Testing of detection tools for AI-generated text
Recent advances in generative pre-trained transformer large language models have emphasised the potential risks of unfair use of artificial intelligence (AI) generated content in an academic environment and intensified efforts in searching for solutions to detect such content. The paper examines the general functionality of detection tools for AI-generated text and evaluates them based on accuracy and error type analysis. Specifically, the study seeks to answer research questions about whether existing detection tools can reliably differentiate between human-written text and ChatGPT-generated text, and whether machine translation and content obfuscation techniques affect the detection of AI-generated text. The research covers 12 publicly available tools and two commercial systems (Turnitin and PlagiarismCheck) that are widely used in the academic setting. The researchers conclude that the available detection tools are neither accurate nor reliable and have a main bias towards classifying the output as human-written rather than detecting AI-generated text. Furthermore, content obfuscation techniques significantly worsen the performance of tools. The study makes several significant contributions. First, it summarises up-to-date similar scientific and non-scientific efforts in the field. Second, it presents the result of one of the most comprehensive tests conducted so far, based on a rigorous research methodology, an original document set, and a broad coverage of tools. Third, it discusses the implications and drawbacks of using detection tools for AI-generated text in academic settings.
OpenAI can’t tell if something was written by AI after all
OpenAI’s tool struggled with accuracy.
Artificial Writing and Automated Detection
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly used for written deliverables. This has created demand for distinguishing human-generated text from AI-generated text at scale, e.g., ensuring assignments were completed by students, product reviews written by actual customers, etc. A decision-maker aiming to implement a detector in practice must consider two key statistics: the False Negative Rate (FNR), which corresponds to the proportion of AI-generated text that is falsely classified as human, and the False Positive Rate (FPR), which corresponds to the proportion of human-written text that is falsely classified as AI-generated. We evaluate three leading commercial detectors—Pangram, OriginalityAI, GPTZero—and an open-source one —RoBERTa—on their performance in minimizing these statistics using a large corpus spanning genres, lengths, and models. Commercial detectors outperform open-source, with Pangram achieving near-zero FNR and FPR rates that remain robust across models, threshold rules, ultra-short passages, "stubs" (≤ 50 words) and ’humanizer’ tools. A decision-maker may weight one type of error (Type I vs. Type II) as more important than the other. To account for such a preference, we introduce a framework where the decision-maker sets a policy cap—a detector-independent metric reflecting tolerance for false positives or negatives. We show that Pangram is the only tool to satisfy a strict cap (FPR ≤ 0.005) without sacrificing accuracy. This framework is especially relevant given the uncertainty surrounding how AI may be used at different stages of writing, where certain uses may be encouraged (e.g., grammar correction) but may be difficult to separate from other uses.
Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs
We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. We then design attacks for the closed-world setting. Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives. Compared to classical deanonymization work (e.g., on the Netflix prize) that required structured data, our approach works directly on raw user content across arbitrary platforms. We construct three datasets with known ground-truth data to evaluate our attacks. The first links Hacker News to LinkedIn profiles, using cross-platform references that appear in the profiles. Our second dataset matches users across Reddit movie discussion communities; and the third splits a single user's Reddit history in time to create two pseudonymous profiles to be matched. In each setting, LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.
Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs
We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. We then design attacks for the closed-world setting. Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives. Compared to classical deanonymization work (e.g., on the Netflix prize) that required structured data, our approach works directly on raw user content across arbitrary platforms. We construct three datasets with known ground-truth data to evaluate our attacks. The first links Hacker News to LinkedIn profiles, using cross-platform references that appear in the profiles. Our second dataset matches users across Reddit movie discussion communities; and the third splits a single user's Reddit history in time to create two pseudonymous profiles to be matched. In each setting, LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.
OpenAI Just Published an Absolutely Bizarre Blog Post
OpenAI published a blog post emphasizing its commitment to safety and harm mitigation. Its promises read as proactive — but are anything but.
User Privacy and Large Language Models: An Analysis of Frontier Developers' Privacy Policies
Hundreds of millions of people now regularly interact with large language models via chatbots. Model developers are eager to acquire new sources of high-quality training data as they race to improve model capabilities and win market share. This paper analyzes the privacy policies of six U.S. frontier AI developers to understand how they use their users' chats to train models. Drawing primarily on the California Consumer Privacy Act, we develop a novel qualitative coding schema that we apply to each developer's relevant privacy policies to compare data collection and use practices across the six companies. We find that all six developers appear to employ their users' chat data to train and improve their models by default, and that some retain this data indefinitely. Developers may collect and train on personal information disclosed in chats, including sensitive information such as biometric and health data, as well as files uploaded by users. Four of the six companies we examined appear to include children's chat data for model training, as well as customer data from other products. On the whole, developers' privacy policies often lack essential information about their practices, highlighting the need for greater transparency and accountability. We address the implications of users' lack of consent for the use of their chat data for model training, data security issues arising from indefinite chat data retention, and training on children's chat data. We conclude by providing recommendations to policymakers and developers to address the data privacy challenges posed by LLM-powered chatbots.
User Privacy and Large Language Models: An Analysis of Frontier Developers' Privacy Policies
Hundreds of millions of people now regularly interact with large language models via chatbots. Model developers are eager to acquire new sources of high-quality training data as they race to improve model capabilities and win market share. This paper analyzes the privacy policies of six U.S. frontier AI developers to understand how they use their users' chats to train models. Drawing primarily on the California Consumer Privacy Act, we develop a novel qualitative coding schema that we apply to each developer's relevant privacy policies to compare data collection and use practices across the six companies. We find that all six developers appear to employ their users' chat data to train and improve their models by default, and that some retain this data indefinitely. Developers may collect and train on personal information disclosed in chats, including sensitive information such as biometric and health data, as well as files uploaded by users. Four of the six companies we examined appear to include children's chat data for model training, as well as customer data from other products. On the whole, developers' privacy policies often lack essential information about their practices, highlighting the need for greater transparency and accountability. We address the implications of users' lack of consent for the use of their chat data for model training, data security issues arising from indefinite chat data retention, and training on children's chat data. We conclude by providing recommendations to policymakers and developers to address the data privacy challenges posed by LLM-powered chatbots.
OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts
Reddit’s signed AI licensing deals with Google and OpenAI.
Privacy Considerations with AI Tools
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools come in all sorts of flavors. There are notetaking and transcription tools, chatbots, device-wide agentic AI features, grammar and writing tools, translation assistants, AI summaries, and research tools, among others. As a term, “AI” may refer to features in apps, apps themselves, third-party plug-ins, or a...
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