What Do AI Companies Know About the Future of Work?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Countless companies invest in AI tools without tying them to tangible business outcomes. Join McKinsey later to learn how leaders rewire their organizations for sustained impact and value.

**Imani Moise** (0:17)
Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, June 30th. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal.
Move over Netflix. Sharing your password has moved from streaming to chatbots. But while the practice might save you money, it could lead to some unexpected headaches. We're getting into why sharing a chatbot may cause more problems than you bargained for. Then, we peek inside the biggest tech companies to look at how the people behind your favorite AI tools are offloading their work to agents. We're unpacking what other office workers can learn from their experiments and where the tech is causing friction.
But first, the cost of subscriptions for AI chatbots like Gemini, Cloud, and ChatGPT can add up quickly. To save money, some people are sharing their passwords and their accounts. But the stakes around sharing a chatbot password are a bit higher than giving out details to your Netflix account. Instead of exposing your reality TV habit, sharing a chatbot can expose details about your work, health, and personal life. Natalie Kaufman, who reported on this for The Wall Street Journal, spoke with our producer Julie Chang about why you should think twice before pooling your logins.

**Julie Chang** (1:32)
You spoke to some people who are sharing passwords for their chatbot accounts. Can you tell us about some of them and why they were sharing a password?

**Natalie Kaufman** (1:40)
So, a lot of the people I interviewed are about 21, 22 college students on a budget don't really want to pay for premium chatbots themselves, so a lot of them decided to share the wealth with their friends who are also studying with them, and one person I spoke with actually uses it to manage his Crohn's disease, and his study partner found some intimate details about him when she was able to use the account, so that was unfortunate for him.

**Julie Chang** (2:07)
Yeah, other than that example you just gave us, what were some of the other issues that people experienced?

**Natalie Kaufman** (2:12)
Yeah, a lot of it has to do with workflow disruption, so not everyone is studying the same thing at college. So one person I spoke with, she's a nursing student and her roommate does education studies, and so when the nursing student was trying to come up with some exam style questions to practice with the chatbot, it would draw on information from her roommate's study, so it would put in jargon from whatever the roommate is doing in class, and taint the quality of the flashcards she was doing, so that was challenging. Then other people were using the chatbots to come up with texts for cover letters, and it would just lump everyone together and make things a little bit jumbled.

**Julie Chang** (2:53)
Gotcha. So does sharing a password make the chatbot work less well?

**Natalie Kaufman** (2:59)
Yeah, I would say so. At least the people I spoke with had that experience. A lot of the time, it starts out where everything is fine and no one's having any issues. And then as the chatbot is trained on all the different data over time, it kind of learns from that and starts just kind of getting confused. You know, your brain can only process so many things at one time. The same goes for like an algorithm. So it just kind of all gets mixed up and creates some really bizarre outputs.

**Julie Chang** (3:26)
And what have the companies behind the chatbot said about sharing their products?

**Natalie Kaufman** (3:30)
Yeah, so OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker, very much discourages people from sharing their accounts. They say someone else wants to use OpenAI's products, they can sign up for their own account. And then they also have a feature called group chats. So up to 20 people can use that tool at one time and do kind of a collaborative workflow. But everyone has their own separate accounts. So it's something that they say is not just like a business necessity for them, like wanting people to sign up for their own accounts and pay, but also has to do with data security and making sure that the model is personalized to whoever's using it.

**Julie Chang** (4:04)
Speaking of data security, are there any cybersecurity or privacy risks to sharing a chatbot account?

**Natalie Kaufman** (4:10)
Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you do start sharing things like medical or legal information or even family struggles. Other people can see that. And also some cybersecurity experts I spoke with said, you don't even know who else outside of the small group of people you're sharing it with can see that, because people can take screenshots of the chat logs. So it's just really important the same way as you wouldn't do, you know, banking or trading stocks on public Wi-Fi.