ChatGPT bug definitely revealed your lazy writing habits (updated)

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If you haven’t felt exposed by ChatGPT yet, this will surely do it: ChatGPT revealed some of your chat history.

Yea, seriously. And there’s even proof to back it up. People wasted no time posting screenshots of their ChatGPT UI on social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter with chats, they claim, weren’t theirs.

Thankfully, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief – the chat titles were only visible – not the full chats.

In response to Bloomberg, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, issued a statement confirming that they were aware of the issue and had temporarily disabled ChatGPT.

CEO Sam Altman later issued another statement on March 22 and tweeted,

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,” he wrote. “a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history. we feel awful about this.”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.”

So what caused this to happen? Is the AI already sending out cries for help?

No, an open-source software bug seems to be the culprit here, but OpenAI is still investigating the root cause.

For now, chat histories are still disabled, even though the outage only lasted ten hours, according to the company’s incident report.

So if you’re one of the many people wondering when you can start diving back into your old conversations, it looks like we’ll have to sit tight and wait for further updates from the company.

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com.