John Paul M. Joaquin Tech 03.21.2023 07:Mar AM EDT

OpenAI To Fix ChatGPT Bug Exposing Chat Histories

ChatGPT might have leaked people's chat history to others.

OpenAI recently announced it is temporarily shutting down its popular ChatGPT service to fix a bug that exposed users' chat histories to some people.

OpenAI re-launched ChatGPT again, but some features are inaccessible as of press time, possibly due to the company still working on a fix to patch the bug out of the service.

ChatGPT Privacy Bug Details

An OpenAI told Bloomberg that the company received reports of an issue affecting ChatGPT sometime before the morning of Mar. 20, with them stating it allowed some users to see the titles of other users' chat histories.

The spokesperson explained that the titles were visible in the user-history sidebar that typically appears on the left side of the ChatGPT webpage. The interface that appears on ChatGPT's webpage typically features a sidebar displaying past conversations that are only visible to the user who had them, per Vice.

However, several people reported to OpenAI that ChatGPT is showing them people's histories without doing anything differently, meaning that there could have been other people that saw others' chat histories using their own accounts unknowingly.

PC Mags report goes deeper; the discrepancy between being able to see people's chat histories became more apparent when a Reddit user spotted conversations in Chinese on their history sidebar.

There is one outlier that mentioned they could only see the title of people's chats and not their entire chat log.

OpenAI didn't immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the bug, but it did eventually take the service down without notice. Vice noted that the company first made users' history sidebar unavailable before taking it offline, citing OpenAI's status page at the time.

The OpenAI spokesperson revealed that a bug in an unnamed open-source software caused the problem and that the company is still investigating the precise cause.

In the meantime, OpenAI re-launched ChatGPT for users to utilize again, though the history sidebar is unavailable until further notice.

"History is temporaily unavailable," read OpenAI's message in the sidebar. "We're working to restore this feature as soon as possible."

Calls For Better Privacy Security

While OpenAI is still investigating the precise cause of the bug, it stirred users' concerns about their privacy while using the service due to the fact that a stranger may have seen and recorded any personal information they shared with the service in the past.

Thankfully, many of the cases of the bug sharing others' chat histories revealed that the service would only surface generic terms when showing chat histories possibly taken from users in the past, omitting any personal information in the process.

However, the bug does present an issue for OpenAI to solve as it underscores one of the risks of using ChatGPT. In fact, A UK spy agency recently warned the UK and the world that AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, could pose a security threat to individuals and companies using them because they are unprotected at the source.