In a privateness snafu, OpenAI has confirmed {that a} glitch briefly brought on ChatGPT to leak the dialog histories of random customers earlier this week.
“We really feel terrible about this,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted on Wednesday.
ChatGPT archives and shows your previous conversations, supplying you with a working document of all of your textual content inputs with this system. On Monday morning, some folks noticed that the chat historical past perform was displaying unfamiliar previous conversations seemingly from different folks.
ChatGPT additionally skilled an outage on the identical day. Initially, OpenAI remained mum on the scenario, however on Wednesday, Altman lastly confirmed the info publicity was actual. “A small proportion of customers had been capable of see the titles of different customers’ dialog historical past,” he tweeted, with out elaborating.
Though some feared the privateness snafu was attributable to a hack, Altman blamed the issue on a software program bug in an unnamed “open supply library.” The excellent news is that OpenAI launched a patch, which has been validated. Nevertheless it appears to be like like the corporate might have misplaced customers’ chat histories for Monday, March 20.
“Unfortunately, users will not be able to access their chat history from monday 1 am PDT until monday 10 am PDT,” Altman said, the same timeframe the bug occurred.
The company plans on providing more details through a “technical postmortem,” Altman added. In the meantime, the conversation history sidebar has been down for ChatGPT since Monday.
It remains unclear whether the bug exposed anyone’s sensitive personal information. But Altman’s tweet says only the “titles” of other users’ conversation histories were exposed, not necessarily the full contents. Users who tried to click on the exposed chat histories reported experiencing an error that prevented full disclosure. The leaked titles also contained no apparent indication of who the chat history belonged to.
Despite Altman’s tweet, OpenAI has yet to address another apparent bug that caused the payment form for ChatGPT Plus to seemingly leak the email addresses for different customers on Monday morning. The corporate hasn’t responded to requests for remark.
