Users can view other people’s chat histories

ChatGPT is currently on everyone’s lips. But now the creators of the AI ​​software had to admit a data breach. Because at the beginning of the week ChatGPT published conversation histories of random users.

The popular AI software ChatGPT is currently on the rise. In January, the tool broke the one million user mark in just five days. In the meantime, the number of monthly active users could be around one million, as experts estimate.

But as is so often the case on the Internet, with a large number of users, the first data breach is not far away. Users are said to have been shown old chat histories from other users.

What is behind the data breach at ChatGPT?

At the beginning of the week, the first users noticed that ChatGPT shows previous conversations in their chat histories. However, these did not belong to their own and apparently came from other users.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has now confirmed the data breach on Twitter. “We feel terrible about it,” he wrote in a tweet.

Accordingly, a “small percentage” of users were able to view the chat history of others. This was a “significant issue” that arose due to a bug in an open source library. The correction is now complete.

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.

we feel awful about this.

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 22, 2023

Why is such a breakdown possible?

Since ChatGPT acts as a chatbot, the platform archives all past conversations. You can imagine this as being similar to a messenger, in which old chat histories can also be viewed.

In order to fix the error in the open source library, OpenAI apparently had to remove Monday’s chat histories. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman writes, users “cannot access their chat histories from Monday 1 a.m. PDT to Monday 10 a.m. PDT”.

unfortunately, users will not be able to access their chat history from monday 1 am PDT until monday 10 am PDT.

we will follow up with a technical postmortem.

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 22, 2023

Has personal data also been published?

Altman goes on to tweet that the company will release more details in a “technical postmortem.” Until the issue is finally resolved, the chat history view feature is suspended.

It is not yet clear whether personal data of users has been published. According to Altmann, however, only the “titles” of the chat histories ended up with other users.

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