Unlike before, ChatGPT is now capable of browsing the internet to provide users with current information, as announced by their parent company OpenAI.
The chatbot was previously trained to use data up to September 2021, which at the time meant it cannot provide real-time information.
OpenAI announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the new update allows it to move past the September 2021 cutoff and access current information on the internet.
ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources. It is no longer limited to data before September 2021. pic.twitter.com/pyj8a9HWkB
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 27, 2023
OpenAI also announced that the “Browse with Bing” option is now available to users of the paid versions of ChatGPT, adding “we’ll expand to all users soon.”
They have tested a feature that allows users to access the latest information through the Bing search engine within its premium ChatGPT Plus offering. This feature was included in May but was later on disabled after two months over fears that it could allow users to bypass paywalls.
The new feature works similarly to Bard, a chatbot developed and launched by Google in March of this year. There were privacy concerns about accessing real-time information as the bot could pick up harmful material, misinformation, and copyrighted content online and display it to users.
Aside from this, users have to enable their chat history to allow the new browser plugin to work. This means that personal data can be shared with the model.
There are some that have raised concerns over this function.
Director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, Alex Hanna, said, “People are at the risk of their legal data being scraped. Research has shown that certain kinds of private information have been leaked through these different systems. We don’t know what is being leaked just because of how private these companies have kept their data sources.”
OpenAI stated that the latest feature would allow websites to control how ChatGPT can interact with them.
Hanna said that the chatbot can display hallucinations, misinformation, and inaccurate information. She also added that AI tools and search engines have racial and gender bias as this is proven by research including Safiya Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression which shows how search engine results for questions about Black women and white women differ, exposing racism and sexism within the algorithms.
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