Since a malfunction earlier this week exposed brief summaries of other users’ talks on the site, ChatGPT’s chat history functionality has been unavailable.
A Reddit user first brought attention to the problem by sharing a picture of descriptions of discussions in ChatGPT that weren’t their own. A Twitter user then uploaded a snapshot of the same bug.
The issue was confirmed by OpenAI, who added that the bug did not disclose the complete transcripts of the talks, simply their brief descriptive titles.
An FAQ on the OpenAI website cautions ChatGPT users not to disclose any sensitive information in their talks in order to prevent any additional data breaches.
The business made it clear that chats may be used for training purposes and that it is not possible to erase individual prompts from a person’s history.
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
OpenAI CEO Tweeted Regarding ChatGPT Bug
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, tweeted that a “bug in an open-source library” was to blame for the problem and that a technical postmortem will follow.
Altman said that the library’s update has been made public and verified by OpenAI, but he omitted to say when users should anticipate seeing their conversation history once more.
we had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating.
a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.
we feel awful about this.
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 22, 2023
The day after the event, according to Bloomberg, OpenAI temporarily stopped down ChatGPT due to a glitch.
The chat history sidebar was replaced with a message indicating that “History is temporarily unavailable,” even though it was made available again later that evening.
Service has been restored, but OpenAI is still trying to restore past chat records for all users, according to the most recent statement on the company’s status website on Monday.
Altman did clarify, however, that users won’t have access to the discussions they had on March 27 from 4 AM to 1 PM ET (1.30 PM to 10 PM IST).
To read our blog on “Apple’s Siri may soon use ChatGPT-like technology,” click here.
