PieFed.World
ChatGPT users shocked to learn their chats were in Google search results
return2ozma
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The messaging in the option to share this is pretty obvious. I don't know why you'd be upset. It's not like it's hidden in a tos.
sad_detective_manso Google can crawl through people's RP with a sexbot and present it as search results but refuses to crawl a public web forum so that I can get some decent tech answers using "site:"
glad they got their priorities straight.
I haven't used google in years, but "site:" does seem to be worse since I started using different search engines.
it definitely is. Google will straight up ignore common punks if your using the mobile version or app. but it also just doesn't crawl many message boards, only their home page. I still have to use it because alternatives like startpage don't either but also don't have punks at all (that I know of).
what are you using? is it close to Google's scope?
I mainly use duckduckgo. I love to use !bangs to search on another site.
e.g. "!osm madrid" searches for Madrid directly on Open Street Map's website.
SearXNG also supports this with the same syntax, and can call fallback to using DDG bangs with two '!' And you can make your own custom bangs if you're self-hosting, if you're technically inclined.
FriendOfDeSotoIf you were "shocked" that your chats were googleable, you were also revealed to be lackadaisical about your own data. Yes, they could've made it clearer but you yourself ticked like three boxes to get here. It's like you accept the Ts and Cs without reading them and now the corporation owns your first born.
So why OpenAI thought this feature would be useful is astounding in itself and they chickened out faster than 47 as a result of the bad PR. But this is more on the users clicking willy nilly and not bothering to do their own due diligence. 80/20 split imo. If you thought it was okay to make your ChatGPT advice on your resume "discoverable," you need to blame yourself.
Edited typo
You're not incorrect, but time has shown that some proportion of society will always act this way. And as much as it feels rational to shit on these people, a large number of people being victimised for their laziness and stupidity has flow on effects to broader society.
I know what you mean. That's why I see a 80/20 split there in terms of blame. Being dumb and ignorant creates mitigating circumstances but doesn't render you not guilty by default. The flow on effect mustn't be a complete abandonment of the concept of suffering personal consequences for doing dumb shit either. It's a good learning case, hopefully educational for the willy nilly section of society.
ZDLWhat?! A techbrodude firm that doesn't care about things like "privacy" or "consent" or any other such things that get in the way of being rapacious plunderers?!
*SAY IT AIN'T SO!*
Private? I remember LLM services to actually warn you about sharing sensitive information with the bot because there's nothing private about it. If you're shocked about this you've been living under a rock.
It would have never happened if they were using any chinese alternatives like Deepseek or Qwen. but here we are in the dystopian world ruled by westerners :(
The trick is to make them only searchable without the default safe search. Make every prompt a little too sexy.
The trick is reading checkboxes before pressing them.
I don't know what people expected the option
☐ Make this chat discoverable
Allows it to be shown in web searches
to do.
I also don't know why it would have been implemented in the first place, but at least it was very clear.
It's for the transition period. Before chatgpt becomes the new default search engine system they need to put their chats into the old search engines. Like how it's easier to search Google with "site: reddit.com" to find answers than actually using the broad search.
ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86
UX designer here. People don’t read the little gray supporting text. “Search Engine” should’ve been in the headline.
I've always been under the impression that the little grey supporting text being little and grey is because the designer didn't want it read but was required to put it somewhere. A dark pattern, if you will. Is it actually not intended that way?
When it’s used correctly, it should be adding a little extra color or context that’s not critical for most users, but will be helpful to a certain segment.
Or it’s bullshit that you -know- the user doesn’t care about, but it’s needed to make some person or department happy.
Or it’s a dark pattern.
Are these the same users that think the sycophant machine really loves them?
Deleted by moderator
That and conservatives abhor thinking. They need someone or something to defer to. And LLMs can give them all sorts of moderately intelligent bullshit they've come to expect . From their leaders and politicians. But better and faster. With possibly even less accuracy.
Seems like a skill issue to be honest. Bunch of boomers checking boxes they dont understand, since thats entirely optional thing to create. Those public links arent created by themselves.
Apparently these people ticked a box saying "allow this chat to be indexed by search engines" and were surprised when their chats were indexed by search engines?
Where is that box ?
even here
It's not there either
It's in the article, it said it was a short lived experiment.
I remember seeing the check box option appear to directly index to google, this explains why I can't find it anymore.
I tried searching unique things in my shared text and couldn't find any of them on the goog
Well I'm shocked more people don't ignore the flashing lights at train stations and just drive into the tracks right in front the trains frankly.
unrelated but kinda related - I’m a firefighter. Often seen folks driving toward the scene lights like moths. Can be sketchy sometimes. I suspect it’s the collimated leds just piercing into the brains of the already distracted drivers.
Target fixation. If you're looking at something, you drift towards it.
They kind of do.
Says in the article the users clicked "share chat" then shared the links with others on services like What's App.
Sounds like What's App should get some flack for this too.
I don't see why, least my understanding, you hit share chat, it creates a public link... google's robots discover everything public and index it. Seems to me like the same problem would happen if you generated a link to share on any platform, and burned it and never sent information to any platform. Unless googles indexing all whatsapp messages, but that would be a much bigger story.
Anyway point is blame IMO falls on either chatgpt for not properly configuring a robots.txt, or google for not following it.
How does it discover the link though? Is it crawling your whatsapp chats, or just trying every possible chatgpt share link?
Y'all need to read the 5 minute article. It was a short lived feature where they had a checkbox that said: "index my chat into search engines". Which is honestly dumb as shit if you ask me.
sounds to me just like googles bots are finding them... could also just be maybe chrome or similar taking note when it finds a page and dropping a dime to google.
Google's search bots shouldn't find chats except through dumb luck.
Because without the GUID, it's nearly impossible to find any shared chats at all.
That's just how GUIDs work
I don't know what the deal is, just that the article specifically names What's App.
Oh no. Anyway.
My only thought is "no shit"
how are they shocked, when they also get blog posts, and other posts being summarized on the AI search?
When you share something it's not private anymore! More news at 23:00!
Its one thing to not be private. Its an entirely different thing for that thing to be crawled, indexed and published on the world's biggest catalogue
Yep, and when you click a button that liteally says "make this discoverable on search engines" which is off by defualt, its the later.
When it's chats with LLMs trained on this very type of data, it's mostly the user's fault. Of course, executives of LLM companies should still rot in prison.
It’s totally avoidable if you don’t use it, but I think the onus is mostly on the companies for advertising these chat bots as like, a friendly personal assistant when that’s absolutely not what they are. Like all “AI” shit, it runs mostly on consumer deception.
Not on the internet it's not.
Omg! Now everyone will know about my erectile dysfunction!
lol this was on purpose
FAFO.
Shocked, *shocked* I tell ya.
Insert Casablanca.gif
I mean, we knew this…
wait, even if I only used duck.ai?
No
it claims to be private, but also couldn't answer me when I asked how I could verify that claim