- Kyle Chua
ChatGPT Bug Reveals Titles of Other Users' Chat Histories
ChatGPT briefly went down on Monday, 20 March after users discovered the service exposed the titles of others' chat histories.
According to Engadget, a number users took to social networks like Reddit and Twitter to post screenshots showing how ChatGPT's sidebar contained chats that weren't their own. "This is a devastating security issue," commented one Reddit user. "It shows how weak their allocation system is and the possible lack of encryption in storage. Beyond security implications, this is a data privacy nightmare."
A spokesperson for OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup behind the viral chatbot service, confirmed the incident but said the bug did not share the full transcripts of the conversations.
OpenAI shut down ChatGPT sometime on Monday in response to the incident. The startup managed to roll out a fix and restore access about 10 or so hours later, though chat history remains offline, as of writing. OpenAI, however, says it's working on restoring the feature as soon as possible. The chat history feature saves old conversations or prompts so users can go back to them later. No estimate has been shared yet as to when users can expect the feature to be fixed.
The cause of the incident reportedly stems from a bug in an unnamed open source software, but what exactly triggered it is still unknown.
If there's anything that users can take away from this incident, it's that they should be careful of the information they share on ChatGPT. OpenAI's website reminds users not to share sensitive information with the chatbot as those can be saved in the chat history, and can be used in training the AI.
The incident comes less than a week after OpenAI officially announced GPT-4, the latest language model that's set to power ChatGPT. The new system is touted to be "more creative and collaborative" than its predecessor, GPT-3.5, the model currently powering ChatGPT. GPT-4 is also multimodal, being able to analyse text and image inputs, or a combination of both.
ChatGPT briefly went down on Monday after users discovered the service exposed the titles of others' chat histories.
A spokesperson for OpenAI, the AI startup behind the viral chatbot service, confirmed the incident but said the bug did not share the full transcripts of the conversations.
OpenAI has managed to roll out a fix and restore access about 10 or so hours later, though chat history remains offline, as of writing.