OpenAI revealed Friday a bug exposed some ChatGPT users’ personal information and credit card details to others using the service.
The bug was spotted Monday, when a ‘small percentage’ of users this week could see chat titles in their own conversation history that were not theirs – but the issue is much deeper than previously thought.
OpenAI said Friday: ‘It was possible for some users to see another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date.’
The announcement stated 1.2 percent of ChatGPT Plus subscribers. The San Francisco-based company has around 100 million users, but it is not clear how many are paying for the service.
The news of the leak offset OpenAI’s massive upgrade to ChatGPT, which allows it to access the internet to provide users with real-time data.
OpenAI revealed Friday a bug exposed some ChatGPT users’ personal information and credit card details to others using the service
ChatGPT was founded by in Silicon Valley in 2015 by a group of American angel investors including current CEO Sam Altman.
It is a large language model that has been trained on a massive amount of text data, allowing it to generate responses to a given prompt.
People across the world have used the platform to write human-like poems, texts and various other written works.
On Monday, one person on Twitter warned others to ‘be careful’ of the chat bot which had shown them other people’s conversation topics.
An image of their list showed a number of titles including ‘Girl Chases Butterflies’, ‘Books on human behaviour’ and ‘Boy Survives Solo Adventure’, but it was unclear which of these were not theirs.
They said: ‘If you use #ChatGPT be careful! There’s a risk of your chats being shared to other users!
‘Today I was presented another user’s chat history. I couldn’t see contents, but could see their recent chats’ titles.’
The announcement stated 1.2 percent of ChatGPT Plus subscribers
OpenAI said Friday: ‘It was possible for some users to see another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed Wednesday that the company was experiencing a ‘significant issue’ that threatened the privacy of conversations on its platform.
The bug, which has been patched, was discovered in the Redis client open-source library, redis-py.
‘We believe the number of users whose data was actually revealed to someone else is extremely low,’ Open AI shared in the announcement.
While the company works to ensure the safety of its users’ data, it is helping to improve their ChatGPT experience.
The company introduced plugins that enables the chabot to interact with the internet and third-party websites, providing users with sports scores, stock prices, dinner reservations and more.
The first plugins for ChatGPT were created by Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram and Zapier.
Micrsofot’s Bing API also includes a new plugin, allowing ChatGPT to search for current information on the internet.
Industry experts a praising the upgrade, saying ChatGPT will make ‘thousands of websites completely obsolete.’
