Since launching its flagship invention, OpenAI‘s ChatGPT has been one of the most talked about AI in the tech space.
And although the platform is accessible for everyone to use and send feedback to the AI company, some users have recently reported being unable to access the site due to heavy user traffic.
ChatGPT has now encountered a glitch where some users can see the search history of other users, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. ChatGPT users who noticed the glitch took to Twitter and Reddit to share images of chat histories they said weren’t theirs, with some chat histories showing in different languages.
Atman took to Twitter where he said, “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.”
“We feel awful about this.”
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.
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 22, 2023
a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.
we feel awful about this.
The CEO added that users will not be able to access their chat history from Monday 1 am PDT until Monday 10 am PDT and that the company, “Will follow up with a technical postmortem.”
Privacy concerns
Whether or not the glitch is fixed will leave a lot of users concerned about their privacy on the platform. The chatbot has been used by millions to create content since it launched in late November and has since stored every user’s chat history so they can revisit it later.
According to BBC, a Reddit user shared an image of their ChatGPT history which to their surprise, included words like ‘Chinese Socialism Development’ and other chats that were in Mandarin.
For now, the company is not allowing any user to access their chat history until later, once the system has been stabilised.
The history bar on the site shows, ‘History is temporarily unavailable. We’re working to restore this feature as soon as possible.’ And although some users can already access their actual chats, the fix is still rolling out to other regions.
OpenAI recently launched its GPT-4 model and while the history glitch with ChatGPT might be of little concern for many users, it may just be enough to convince some users to pay for the new and more advanced GPT-4 AI model where such a glitch is less likely to occur.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
