OpenAI issues warning to ChatGPT users after bug leaks private conversations

The chat history feature of ChatGPT has been offline for a few days after a bug caused brief descriptions of other users’ conversations to be exposed on the service earlier this week. The bug was initially highlighted by a Reddit user who posted a photo showing descriptions of ChatGPT conversations that weren't theirs, and a Twitter user also shared a screenshot of the same bug. 

OpenAI confirmed the incident and stated that the bug only shared brief descriptive titles of conversations and not the full transcripts. To prevent any further data breaches, an FAQ on OpenAI’s website warns ChatGPT users not to share any sensitive information in their conversations. The company clarified that it is unable to delete specific prompts from a person’s history and that conversations may be used for training.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to Twitter to announce that the issue was caused by "a bug in an open-source library" and that a technical postmortem would be provided later. Altman also confirmed that the fix for the library has been released and validated by OpenAI, but did not mention when users could expect to see their chat histories again.

Following the incident, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI temporarily shut down ChatGPT on Monday in response to the bug. Although it was brought back online later that night, the chat history sidebar was replaced with a message stating that "History is temporarily unavailable." The company assured its users that it is "working to restore this feature as soon as possible."

According to the latest update on OpenAI's status page on Monday, service has been restored, but the company is still working to bring back past conversation histories for all users. However, Altman confirmed that users won’t have access to chats they did from 4 AM ET to 1 PM ET (1.30 PM - 10 PM IST) on March 27.

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