OpenAI Pauses New ChatGPT App After People Used It to Read Paywalled Content for Free

ChatGPT is back to not knowing about anything that happened after 2021.

Jumping Paywalls

Less than two weeks after launching its "Browse With Bing" browser integration, OpenAI has put the kibosh on the plugin after users were able to bypass paywalls on websites with the app.

In a tweet posted earlier this week, OpenAI admitted that the new feature integrated into the ChatGPT mobile app "can occasionally display content in ways we don't want, e.g. if a user specifically asks for a URL's full text, it may inadvertently fulfill this request" — which is a fancy way of saying that it allowed users to jump article paywalls.

"We are disabling Browse while we fix this — want to do right by content owners," OpenAI continued.

In the now-amended blog post announcing the beta program, OpenAI said that it had temporarily disabled the integration "out of an abundance of caution" and that it would hopefully be back up shortly.

That means paying ChatGPT Plus customers, who shell out $20 a month, now have access to a far more limited set of tools — and that isn't likely going to help OpenAI in its efforts to monetize the tech.

The incident also highlights the contentious issue of AI companies training their models on scraped data without compensating content creators.

Plus/Minus

The new rollback could severely limit the usefulness of ChatGPT. According to TechCrunch, prior to OpenAI's Bing integration feature, the chatbot was only trained on data up to 2021, which means that if you want to search the web with ChatGPT right now, you won't get any current answers.

In other words, ChatGPT is back to being oblivious to anything that happened after September 2021.

And that has angered users, who are now grappling with a far more limited AI chatbot despite paying $20 a month.

"Let’s say I needed it to read a certain repository or topic on GitHub or some forum where the language is foreign to me, now it can’t?" one user wrote in an OpenAI forum. "You’ve got to be kidding me."

As with everything ChatGPT-related, this latest misfire is another example of the many and often-hilarious ways artificial intelligence chatbots can be used and abused.

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