Less than two weeks after launching its "Browse With Bing" browser integration, OpenAI has put the kibosh on the plugin after users were able to bypass paywalls on websites with the app.
In a tweet posted earlier this week, OpenAI admitted that the new feature integrated into the ChatGPT mobile app "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" — which is a fancy way of saying that it allowed users to jump article paywalls.
"We are disabling Browse while we fix this — want to do right by content owners," OpenAI continued.
In the now-amended blog post announcing the beta program, OpenAI said that it had temporarily disabled the integration "out of an abundance of caution" and that it would hopefully be back up shortly.
That means paying ChatGPT Plus customers, who shell out $20 a month, now have access to a far more limited set of tools — and that isn't likely going to help OpenAI in its efforts to monetize the tech.
The incident also highlights the contentious issue of AI companies training their models on scraped data without compensating content creators.
Plus/Minus
The new rollback could severely limit the usefulness of ChatGPT. According to TechCrunch, prior to OpenAI's Bing integration feature, the chatbot was only trained on data up to 2021, which means that if you want to search the web with ChatGPT right now, you won't get any current answers.
In other words, ChatGPT is back to being oblivious to anything that happened after September 2021.
[ed. See also: Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are so good at making things up (Ars Technica):]In a tweet posted earlier this week, OpenAI admitted that the new feature integrated into the ChatGPT mobile app "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" — which is a fancy way of saying that it allowed users to jump article paywalls.
In the now-amended blog post announcing the beta program, OpenAI said that it had temporarily disabled the integration "out of an abundance of caution" and that it would hopefully be back up shortly.
That means paying ChatGPT Plus customers, who shell out $20 a month, now have access to a far more limited set of tools — and that isn't likely going to help OpenAI in its efforts to monetize the tech.
The incident also highlights the contentious issue of AI companies training their models on scraped data without compensating content creators.
Plus/Minus
The new rollback could severely limit the usefulness of ChatGPT. According to TechCrunch, prior to OpenAI's Bing integration feature, the chatbot was only trained on data up to 2021, which means that if you want to search the web with ChatGPT right now, you won't get any current answers.
In other words, ChatGPT is back to being oblivious to anything that happened after September 2021.
by Noor Al-Sibai, Futurism | Read more:
Image: Nurphoto via Getty/Futurism
"Shortly after ChatGPT's launch, people began proclaiming the end of the search engine. At the same time, though, many examples of ChatGPT's confabulations began to circulate on social media. The AI bot has invented books and studies that don't exist, publications that professors didn't write, fake academic papers, false legal citations, non-existent Linux system features, unreal retail mascots, and technical details that don't make sense."
And, introducing Claude 2: New ChatGPT rival, Claude 2, launches for open beta testing (Ars Technica)
"On Tuesday, Anthropic introduced Claude 2, a large language model (LLM) similar to ChatGPT that can craft code, analyze text, and write compositions. Unlike the original version of Claude launched in March, users can try Claude 2 for free on a new beta website. It's also available as a commercial API for developers."
