Are YOUR conversations safe? ChatGPT creator confirms a bug allowed some users to snoop on others’ chat histories

ChatGPT’s creator has confirmed that a bug in the system has allowed some users to snoop on other people’s chat histories.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed last night that the company was experiencing a ‘significant issue’ that threatened the privacy of conversations on its platform.

The revelations came after several social media users shared ChatGPT conversations online that they had not taken part in.

As a result of this, users were then blocked from viewing any chat history between 8am and 5pm (GMT) yesterday.

Mr Altman 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. A small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.’

ChatGPT was founded by in Silicon Valley in 2015 by a group of American angel investors including current CEO Sam Altman. 

It is a large language model that has been trained on a massive amount of text data, allowing it to generate responses to a given prompt.

People across the world have used the platform to write human-like poems, texts and various other written works. 

However, a ‘small percentage’ of users this week could see chat titles in their own conversation history that were not theirs.

On Monday, one person on Twitter warned others to ‘be careful’ of the chat bot which had shown them other people’s conversation topics.

An image of their list showed a number of titles including ‘Girl Chases Butterflies’, ‘Books on human behaviour’ and ‘Boy Survives Solo Adventure’, but it was unclear which of these were not theirs.   

They said: ‘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.’ 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed ChatGPT experienced a ‘significant’ issue yesterday

Users were blocked from viewing any chat history between 8am and 5pm (GMT) yesterday

One person on Twitter warned others to ‘be careful’ of the chat bot which had shown them other people’s conversation topics

During the incident, the user added that they were faced with many errors in regards to network connectivity in addition to ‘unable to load history’ errors.

According to the BBC, another user also claimed they could see conversations written in Mandarin and another called ‘Chinese Socialism Development’.

Following this, ChatGDT functions were temporarily disabled as the company worked to fix the issue.

But this privacy concern is not the first to be raised surrounding the online language model. 

Last month, JP Morgan Chase joined companies like Amazon and Accenture in restricting use of AI chatbot ChatGPT among the company’s some 250,000 staff over concerns about data privacy. 

One of the major shared concerns was that data could be used by ChatGPT’s developers in order to enhance algorithms or that sensitive information could be accessed by engineers. 

ChatGPT’s privacy policy states that it may use personal data surrounding ‘use of the services’ to ‘develop new programs and services’.

However, it is also claimed that this personal information may be de-identified or aggregated before service analysis takes place.