OpenAI kills feature that exposed ChatGPT chats via Google Search
What's the story
OpenAI has decided to remove the option that allowed ChatGPT conversations to be indexed by search engines. The move comes after reports of such interactions appearing in search results, a feature that was recently made available to users. Dane Stuckey, OpenAI's Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), announced this change on social media, calling it a "short-lived experiment" aimed at helping users discover useful conversations.
Feature rollback
Here's why the feature was removed
Stuckey explained that the self-doxing feature was rolled out with the intention of helping users find useful conversations. However, he noted that it created too many chances for unintended information sharing. "Ultimately we think this feature introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn't intend to, so we're removing the option," he said in his post.
Content removal
OpenAI is working to remove indexed content from search engines
Stuckey also revealed that OpenAI is working to remove indexed content from relevant search engines. "We're also working to remove indexed content from the relevant search engines. This change is rolling out to all users through tomorrow morning," he said in his post. The option to have search engines index a chat interaction was presented as a checkbox labeled "Make this chat discoverable" in the "Share public link to chat" pop-up window after clicking on the share icon in ChatGPT.
Ongoing efforts
Search scrubbing effort still in progress
OpenAI's search scrubbing effort is still in progress but not fully complete. While Google Search with the `site:` operator for chatgpt.com/share no longer shows shared, indexed chats, Bing Search returned thousands of results. DuckDuckGo and Brave Search also returned many results with personal information.