Just days after Amazon launched its groundbreaking business-focused chatbot, Amazon Q, some of the company’s employees have reportedly raised serious concerns about the accuracy and privacy of the new AI chatbot.
In fact, some have even gone so far as to say that Q is “experiencing severe hallucinations.” To make matters worse, it has also been accused of leaking confidential business data.
Here’s everything you need to know about Amazon Q and its potential privacy controversy.
What is Amazon Q?
Amazon Q is an AI-powered personal assistant designed especially for businesses. It promises to not only get its users quick and relevant answers and generate content but can also solve problems and assist employees with a wide range of activities.
Although it has a simple interface, much like that of ChatGPT by OpenAI, Amazon Q comes with a unique twist: When you pose a question, it doesn’t scour the internet for answers. Instead, it retrieves answers from your company’s information repositories, code bases, and enterprise systems.
“As a marketing manager, you could ask Amazon Q to transform a press release into a blog post, create a summary of the press release, or create an email draft based on the provided release,” the tech-giant said in a blogpost. “Amazon Q searches through your company content, which can include internal style guides, for example, to provide a response appropriate to your company’s brand standards.”
Amazon Q reportedly allows businesses to connect their data to the AI chatbot through Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Confluence, Zendesk, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and other databases.
Read more: 5 unforeseen chatbot business disasters to learn from
What privacy concerns does Amazon Q pose?
A tech newsletter, Platformer News, has recently unveiled some alarming details about Amazon Q. It appears that the AI chatbot, designed to rival consumer-focused generative AI assistants from Microsoft and Google, has been experiencing notable instances of, well, hallucinations.
“Amazon Q can hallucinate and return harmful or inappropriate responses,” stated an internal document viewed by the newsletter. “For example, Amazon Q might return out of date security information that could put customer accounts at risk.”
Another leaked document stated that the AI chatbot is “experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data.” For those wondering, the leaks include the location of Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers, internal discount programs, and some unreleased features – which could be quite troublesome for the tech company as well as its customers.
However, an Amazon representative told Platformer that Amazon Q is not leaking any sensitive information.
“Some employees are sharing feedback through internal channels and ticketing systems, which is standard practice at Amazon,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “No security issue was identified as a result of that feedback. We appreciate all of the feedback we’ve already received and will continue to tune Q as it transitions from being a product in preview to being generally available.”
It’s not the first time an AI chatbot has made headlines for its weird behavior. In fact, Microsoft’s Bing chatbot Sydney was accused of being “unhinged” only earlier this year. However, the fact that Amazon Q can potentially compromise the privacy of a business is not something that should be taken lightly.
Wrapping it up…
To conclude, Amazon Q, the new business-focused AI chatbot launched by the tech-giant, has reportedly posed some serious privacy concerns by leaking confidential information. In addition, leaked internal documents show that the chatbot can provide incorrect information, which can be rather troublesome, considering that Amazon Q was built to help employees and bosses work in a more productive and secure manner.
This brings us to the end of our blog on Amazon Q and its alleged privacy concerns. To find out more about the latest AI chatbots and learn tips on how to protect your online privacy in the digital age, stay connected to PureVPN Blog. You can also leave your thoughts and queries in the comments section below.
Read more: Is ChatGPT collecting your data? Here’s what you need to know
