Public ChatGPT Queries Are Getting Indexed By Google and Other Search Engines

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: It's a strange glimpse into the human mind: If you filter search results on Google, Bing, and other search engines to only include URLs from the domain 'https://chatgpt.com/share,' you can find strangers' conversations with ChatGPT. Sometimes, these shared conversation links are pretty dull — people ask for help renovating their bathroom, understanding astrophysics, and finding recipe ideas. In another case, one user asks ChatGPT to rewrite their resume for a particular job application (judging by this person's LinkedIn, which was easy to find based on the details in the chat log, they did not get the job). Someone else is asking questions that sound like they came out of an incel forum. Another person asks the snarky, hostile AI assistant if they can microwave a metal fork (for the record: no), but they continue to ask the AI increasingly absurd and trollish questions, eventually leading it to create a guide called 'How to Use a Microwave Without Summoning Satan: A Beginner's Guide.'

ChatGPT does not make these conversations public by default. A conversation would be appended with a '/share' URL only if the user deliberately clicks the 'share' button on their own chat and then clicks a second 'create link' button. The service also declares that 'your name, custom instructions, and any messages you add after sharing stay private.' After clicking through to create a link, users can toggle whether or not they want that link to be discoverable. However, users may not anticipate that other search engines will index their shared ChatGPT links, potentially betraying personal information (my apologies to the person whose LinkedIn I discovered). According to ChatGPT, these chats were indexed as part of an experiment. 'ChatGPT chats are not public unless you choose to share them,' an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch. 'We've been testing ways to make it easier to share helpful conversations, while keeping users in control, and we recently ended an experiment to have chats appear in search engine results if you explicitly opted in when sharing.'

A Google spokesperson also weighed in, telling TechCrunch that the company has no control over what gets indexed. 'Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web. Publishers of these pages have full control over whether they are indexed by search engines.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.