The other day Open AI announced that it disabled the browse with Bing add-on to ChatGPT “out of an abundance of caution.” The issue was that some content that was behind a paywall was being consumed and presented to users. Open AI said they disabled it to do “right by content owners” until they fix it.
The AI company posted, saying, “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 reported the issue was “several users were able to bypass these paywalls using ChatGPT by prompting the tool to print the text on an article behind a paywall.”
I spotted this a week or so ago after I noticed Microsoft Bing’s CEO said on Twitter, “In Bing Chat we have a mechanism to prevent paywalled content from leaking into answers (if publisher set up the “paywall” flag). I will let OpenAI know they should double-check this.”
In short, someone reported to him that OpenAI paywall content issue and he said he will let OpenAI about their issue. Here is the issue he replied to:
ChatGPT Plus users can use Browsing Mode to navigate around paywalled articles:
Tested this on a paywalled article from Fortune Magazine.
After GPT-4 Browsing printed the article, I paid for the Fortune subscription to confirm – it was the same text. ChatGPT did not… pic.twitter.com/YI8ohiY11H
— AI Breakfast (@AiBreakfast) June 26, 2023
