Entrepreneurs edition

The investigating judge at the Rotterdam district court made a ruling that every business owner should know about. Someone used ChatGPT to draft a reply meant for a person bound by professional secrecy. The generated text also included that person's name. The judge ruled that entering confidential, privileged information into ChatGPT can count as making it public. This means the information loses its confidential status. The reasoning: an external AI system like ChatGPT stores what you type and the text it generates, and can use that to train the model. This case was about the professional secrecy of lawyers and notaries, but the lesson goes further. If you paste quotes, contracts, customer details, or a dispute with a supplier into a public chatbot, you're handing that material over. That can come back to bite you later in a conflict or dispute. The difference lies in the type of account. With a free or consumer version, the provider is generally allowed to use your conversations to train the model. With a business version and a data processing agreement, you agree in writing that your data won't be used for training, and where it's stored. A data processing agreement is a contract in which a supplier states exactly what it will and won't do with your data. You'll need that contract later if someone asks how the information got out. The line isn't 'don't use AI', because then you lose the time you'd save. The line runs through what data goes in. Names, file numbers, and medical or financial details of clients don't belong in a public chatbot. An anonymised version of the same question often gives you the same answer. If you have staff, this is a team issue too: employees will use ChatGPT anyway, and it only takes one paste. Agree together which tool to use, and what should never go into it.

Source (in Dutch) →