Introduction

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) in late 2022 has changed people’s understanding of, and interaction with, artificial intelligence (AI). New tools and products that use, or claim to use, AI can be found for almost every purpose – they can write you a novel, pretend to be your girlfriend, help you brush your teeth, take down criminals or predict the future. But LLMs and other similar forms of generative AI create risks – not just big theoretical existential ones – but ones which can and are harming people today. 

In this explainer, we take a closer look at some of the risks for privacy and data protection that arise from the development and deployment of LLMs. LLMs (and other generative AI models) threaten privacy because they depend on the indiscriminate acquisition of large amount of data and because they block and prevent people from being able to exercise their data rights.