ChatGPT pulls plug on Bing integration after people used it to bypass paywalls

Date:
Wed, 05 Jul 2023 18:40:35 +0000

Description:
In an apparent effort to avoid legal trouble, OpenAI pauses ChatGPT's Browse with Bing

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Partys over for ChatGPT Plus subscribers as OpenAI announced it has temporarily disabled the Browse with Bing beta tool from its service. The reason? Apparently, people used the feature to completely bypass paywalls and consume content for free.

Browsing with Bing g ave ChatGPT the ability to pull information from recently published sources so it could answer time-sensitive questions. However, it appears the companys developers underestimated the features capabilities. According to an official help page , if a user specifically
asks for a URLs full text, the AI will fulfill the request, including displaying content from paywalled articles. OpenAI stated its fixing this issue because it wants to do right by content owners. The tool will return someday in the future. Exactly when is unknown at the time of this writing.

Whats also unknown is how the AI was able to bypass paywalls although there
is some speculation on the ChatGPT subreddit . One user points out that since some paywalls are simply pasted over articles, ChatGPT could simply read the code rendering the text and display the content without a problem. Analysis: Avoiding trouble

The response to this announcement has been pretty negative as subscribers flocked to OpenAIs Community forums to air their grievances. Some state
Browse with Bing was the sole reason they purchased ChatGPT Plus in the first place. One poster says the feature allowed them to read some repositories on GitHub or forum posts that were in another language. Others said that without Browse with Bing, theyre not getting their moneys worth .

As angry as these people are, its totally understandable why OpenAI would disable the tool. The company has been hit left, right, and center by
multiple lawsuits. Just to give you an idea, you have the lawsuit from the California-based Clarkson Law Firm which alleges ChatGPT massively violated the copyrights and privacy of countless people when it used data scraped from the internet to train its tech. There are authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad who claim OpenAI used their books to train the generative AI without attribution. And you have Georgia radio host Mark Walters suing the
developers for defamation after ChatGPT claimed he embezzled funds from a non-profit organization.

What's crazy is all those lawsuits are just from this past month.

Needless to say, OpenAI is currently navigating some rough waters. The last thing the company needs right now is to get hit with yet another lawsuit. Better safe than sorry. TechRadar's list of the best ChatGPT extensions for Chrome that everyone should use



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-pulls-plug -on-bing-integration-after-people-used-it-to-bypass-paywalls


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