Be careful of what you search for on ChatGPT because other users might be able to see it.
OpenAI took down ChatGPT for several hours on March 20th to fix a bug that exposed chat titles to other users, as reported by Bloomberg. According to a spokesperson for OpenAI, the bug did not share full transcripts of conversations, but only provided brief descriptive titles.
The bug was first reported by a Reddit user who posted a photo showing descriptions of several ChatGPT conversations that they said were not their own, followed by several other users reporting the issue.
If you use #ChatGPT be careful! There's a risk of your chats being shared to other users!
Today I was presented another user's chat history.
I couldn't see contents, but could see their recent chats' titles.#security #privacy #openAI #AI pic.twitter.com/DLX3CZntao— Jordan L Wheeler (@JordanLWheeler) March 20, 2023
To fix the issue, OpenAI temporarily shut down ChatGPT on Monday. The service was brought back online later in the day, but the chat history sidebar was replaced with a message stating that the history feature was temporarily unavailable. The chat history sidebar still reads, “History is temporarily unavailable. We’re working to restore this feature as soon as possible.”
The cause of the issue is believed to be a bug in an unnamed piece of open-source software. According to OpenAI’s ChatGPT status page, it has completely resolved the issue where user chat history would be visible to other users, but it’s not clear when chat history will return to the sidebar.
Header image credit: Shutterstock
Source: Bloomberg
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