OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is backed by billions of dollars from Microsoft ($MSFT) temporarily took its chat history feature offline as of Tuesday morning, after a bug exposed brief descriptions of other users’ conversations to people on the service.
A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed the incident to Bloomberg, noting that the bug did not share full transcripts of conversations but only brief descriptive titles.
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
This an important reminder to be careful about the sensitive information shared with ChatGPT. “Please don’t share any sensitive information in your conversations,” warns an FAQ on OpenAI’s website, which notes that the company cannot delete specific prompts from a person’s history, and that conversations may be used for training. However, there will inevitably be a strong temptation to share confidential information with the chatbot, particularly as businesses continue to experiment with how to make use of the new tool.
As of this writing the chat history sidebar has been replaced with a message noting that “History is temporarily unavailable” and that the company is “working to restore this feature as soon as possible.” The last update on OpenAI’s status page from 10:54PM ET on Monday notes that service has been restored, but it’s still working to bring back past conversation histories for all users.
Investigations into the precise cause of the bug are still ongoing.