Angela Huyue Zhang
HONG KONG/LONDON – With the launch of GPT-4o, OpenAI has once again shown itself to be the world’s most innovative artificial-intelligence company. This new multimodal AI tool – which seamlessly integrates text, voice, and visual capabilities – is significantly faster than previous models, greatly enhancing the user experience. But perhaps the most attractive feature of GPT-4o is that it is free – or so it seems.
One does not have to pay a subscription fee to use GPT-4o. Instead, users pay with their data. Like a black hole, GPT-4o increases in mass by sucking up any and all material that gets too close, accumulating every piece of information that users enter, whether in the form of text, audio files, or images.
Alex Yang
GPT-4o gobbles up not only users’ own information but also third-party data that are revealed during interactions with the AI service. Let’s assume you are seeking a summary of a New York Times article’s content. You take a screenshot and share it with GPT-4o, which reads the screenshot and generates the requested summary within seconds. For you, the interaction is over. But OpenAI is now in possession of all the copyrighted material from the screenshot you provided, and it can use that information to train and enhance its model.
OpenAI is not alone. In the past year, many firms – including Microsoft, Meta, Google, and X........