The other day, we learned about a ChatGPT glitch that allowed some users to see the titles of other users’ conversations. In fact, a few of these users who saw what other people asked ChatGPT shared images of chat histories on Reddit and Twitter.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, acknowledged the problem with its CEO Sam Altman saying they feel “awful,” adding that this “significant” error had now been fixed.
Still, many users remain concerned about privacy on the platform. And there is a reason for that, as we’ve detailed in a different article.
Since launching in November last year, ChatGPT has been used by millions of people who asked it for help to write messages, songs and even code.
Every conversation with the chatbot is stored in the user’s chat history bar, where it can be revisited later.
But recently, some users began to see conversations appear in their history that they said they hadn’t had with the chatbot.
One Reddit user shared a photo of their chat history, including titles like “Chinese Socialism Development,” as well as conversations in Mandarin.
OpenAI reacted to this by disabling ChatGPT for a few hours to fix the error and now, it all works “as advertised.”
However, this error has drawn concern from users who fear their private information could be released through the tool. And that OpenAI has access to user chats — though they say that user data, including prompts and responses, may be used to continue training the model. The company adds that this data is only used after personally identifiable information has been removed.
As we were saying earlier, while it brings many benefits to everyone, ChatGPT opens up a set of challenges — including those related to our collective privacy. Other solutions may emerge with better privacy protections, though we must add we don’t expect that to be Google’s Bard. If the search giant continues with its practice of selling personalized ads, it will turn it into another data harvesting machine that will further help it serve us even more ads.
But I digress… We will be watching the generative AI space and get back to you as soon as we hear something related to our privacy. Unfortunately, I don’t expect to share much good news on that front, but you never know…