Recently, Open AI announced that the browse with Bing add-on for ChatGPT was disabled “out of pure caution” The problem was that some content that was behind a paywall was being consumed and presented to users. Open AI said they disabled it to “be fair to content owners” until they fixed the issue.
The AI company shared, “As of July 3, 2023, we’ve disabled the Browse with Bing beta feature out of an abundance of caution while we fix this in order to do right by content owners. We are working to bring the beta back as quickly as possible, and appreciate your understanding!”
Windows Central reports that the issue was that “several users were able to bypass these paywalls with ChatGPT by prompting the tool to print the text of an article behind a paywall.”
I discovered this about a week ago after noticing that the CEO of Microsoft Bing said on Twitter, “In Bing Chat, we have a mechanism to prevent content with paywalls from being included in replies (if the publisher has set the “paywall” flag). I will let OpenAI know that they should double check this.”
In short, someone reported the problem with OpenAI’s paywalls to him and he said he would let OpenAI know about the problem. Here is the problem he responded to:
ChatGPT Plus users can use browsing mode to navigate paid articles:
I tested this on a paid Fortune Magazine article.
After GPT-4 Browsing printed the article, I paid for the Fortune subscription to confirm it was the same text. ChatGPT did not… do this… pic.twitter.com/YI8ohiY11H
— AI Breakfast (@AiBreakfast) June 26, 2023
I suspect the issue will be fixed soon, but I guess time will tell.
Forum discussion on Twitter.