ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Resolves 'Significant Issue' That Exposed User Chat Titles to Others

ChatGPT-owner OpenAI said on Wednesday it had fixed a bug that caused a "significant issue" of a small set of users being able to see the titles of others' conversation history with the viral chatbot.

As a result of the fix, users will not be able to access their chat history between 1 am PDT (8 am GMT) and 10 am PDT on March 20, Chief Executive Sam Altman said in a tweet.

ChatGPT has seen a meteoric growth rate after its launch late last year as people worldwide got creative with prompts that the conversational chatbot uses to create everything from poems and novels to jokes and film scripts.

Last week, Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI launched its artificial intelligence model GPT-4, an upgrade from GPT-3.5, which was made available to users through ChatGPT on November 30.

The integration of OpenAI's GPT technology into Microsoft's Bing has driven people to the little-used search engine, according to data from analytics firm Similarweb.

Earlier this week, Google announced the public release of its chatbot Bard, seeking users and feedback to gain ground on Microsoft in a fast-moving race on artificial intelligence technology.

Starting in the US and the UK, consumers can join a waitlist for English-language access to Bard, a program previously open to approved testers only. Google describes Bard as an experiment allowing collaboration with generative AI, technology that relies on past data to create rather than identify content.

Just last week, Google and Microsoft made a flurry of announcements on AI, two days apart. The companies are putting draft-writing technology into their word processors and other collaboration software, as well as marketing-related tools for web developers to build their own AI-based applications.

© Thomson Reuters 2023