ChatGPT conversations indexed on Google: here's the AI that "spys" on us

You'd be interested in learning the art of prompting if the content of your ChatGPT chats ends up online and becomes available to anyone. It's no casual provocation, and FastCompany.com has published an article detailing how to retrieve approximately 4,500 conversations between anonymous users and OpenAI's generative chatbot on Google. The discovery covers interactions in multiple languages and across a wide range of time periods, from highly topical issues to sensitive issues like serious health problems. But the main question is this: how can BigG's search engine index these conversations if the entire Q&A stream is classified and no one (not even OpenAI) can access users' chats? What more or less everyone knows is that Sam Altman's creation (and other generative intelligences as well) can anonymously use the content of these conversations to improve AI models, and only if the user chooses to contribute to the model training process. So what happened?

The secret FastCompany revealed is actually a technical procedure, obviously unknown to most. Simply put, by checking the box that enables the "make chat searchable" command, the chat becomes content viewable in web searches, and therefore indexable by search engines. OpenAI, as is public knowledge, has long offered users the ability to share conversations with ChatGpt through a system that generates a link (containing only the contents of the conversation and not the creator's personal data) that can be shared by anyone who gains access to it. How can you avoid exposing your interactions with AI? The answer is much simpler than you might think: simply leave this feature disabled, as it is by default, and therefore avoid selecting it and essentially lifting the veil of privacy from your conversations.

OpenAI, for its part, has decided to disable the feature that allowed users to make their conversations indexable by search engines, and as its Chief Information Security Officer, Dane Stuckey, wrote on X, the reason is easily explained: "We felt this feature introduced too many opportunities for users to accidentally share unwanted content. We are removing the option and working to remove content that has already been indexed from search engines." Meanwhile, the GenAI saga has seen another chapter.