OpenAI Puts Brakes On ChatGPT App For Unexpected Power Of Bypassing Paywalls

Photo 276821404 © Rafael Henrique | Dreamstime.com

ChatGPT has both amazed and terrified users with its ability to gather information and regurgitate it into bodies of text in an instant. For all its superpowers, though, it also has some noticeable weaknesses. Besides “hallucinating” facts, its knowledge is limited to before September 2021.

That somewhat changed with the introduction of ChatGPT Plus, which allows the tool to connect to the web for real-time news and updates.

About two weeks ago, ChatGPT’s owner OpenAI unleashed Browse with Bing, a plugin that lets ChatGPT search the internet to generate more accurate answers. Unfortunately, that has now been backpedaled as users figured out you could pull content from paywalled articles via the app.

ICYMI: Open AI disabled the browse with Bing ChatGPT feature after users accessed paywall content https://t.co/3buinXas0o pic.twitter.com/0kOxEekX2g

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) July 5, 2023

Some people deduced that the app may have worked similarly with paywall removers, which capture the cached version of webpages before a paywall is added.

Sort of sugar-coating its discovery of the loophole, OpenAI announced on Twitter that it is putting the Browse beta on hold after learning it “can occasionally display content in ways we don’t want,” such as when someone “specifically asks for a URL’s full text, it may inadvertently fulfill this request.”

The company adds: “We are disabling Browse while we fix this.”

In a separate blog post, OpenAI notes that it has disabled Browse with Bing “out of an abundance of caution while we fix this, in order to do right by content owners.”

The pullback comes just as the company is being dragged into a class-action lawsuit for scraping data across the web without consent, which the anonymous plaintiffs assert violates privacy laws.

The temporary removal of the internet-browsing plugin means ChatGPT has now returned to where it was when it only retained stuff up till 2021, which isn’t fun for Plus subscribers who have coughed up US$20 per month for the broader access.

We've learned that ChatGPT's "Browse" beta can occasionally display content in ways we don't want, e.g. if a user specifically asks for a URL's full text, it may inadvertently fulfill this request. We are disabling Browse while we fix this—want to do right by content owners.

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) July 4, 2023

[via Futurism and Cointelegraph, cover photo © Rafael Henrique | Dreamstime.com]