Among all the recent AI tools, none are more popular than OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Ever since it hit mainstream appeal, similar cookie-cutter AIs have cropped up, where some people have either had some friendly conversations or have made it do some downright offensive stuff.
However, for a brief moment, ChatGPT users had to be careful about what they said to their AI confidant, as people were able to search for strangers’ ChatGPT conversations. The reason why we are saying this in past tense is because the feature was immediately pulled a few hours after it was discovered.
Naturally, ChatGPT does not broadcast your entire conversation for the world to see automatically. If you want to share whatever you’ve discussed with the popular AI chatbot, you can do so with a shareable link. Furthermore, users have the option to make that link discoverable only if they toggle that mode on.
Unfortunately, some search engines have indexed these shared ChatGPT links, making these private conversations not so private. Before it was ultimately axed, you had free rein to peruse random people’s conversations and probably their personal information to boot, something that obviously sits well with many users even if they consented to it.
Even though users had to explicitly opt in to this feature, ChatGPT took the safe route and disabled the feature altogether, calling it a “short-lived experiment” in an official X post. In that same post, it was revealed that this feature was meant to help people “discover useful conversations” that users can then apply to their situation but had to pull it back to prevent people from sharing too much sensitive information about themselves. Additionally, ChatGPT is also removing all the previously indexed conversations to prevent any potential future damage to those who can not undo their choice.
(Source: TechCrunch)
