ChatGPT and Grok Conversations are Surfacing Online

Sharing your conversations with ChatGPT with your friends can be fun and educational. However, if you’re concerned about privacy, you might want to rethink it. According to a recent report, it looks like ChatGPT and Grok conversations have surfaced online.

ChatGPT and Grok conversations spotted online

According to a recent report from Digital Digging, the publication discovered over 100,000 ChatGPT and Grok conversations that have been preserved via Archive.org’s Wayback Machine. This means that if you know what you’re looking for, it is possible to find an archive of that.

This is actually not the first time ChatGPT conversations have been spotted online. An earlier report revealed that Google actually indexes your conversations, meaning that it can be found in the search results. This is because of the nature of sharing conversations with AI.

When you click on the share button in ChatGPT, it creates a link to that chat. This link is then indexed by Google, meaning that it can be found in search with the right keywords. OpenAI closed the loop by scrubbing those chats, but it seems that not all of it was deleted. 

When Digital Digging reached out to the director of the Wayback Machine, Mark Graham, for comment, he said, “I can/will tell you we have not gotten, or honored any requests for (large scale) URL exclusion of ‘chatgpt.com/share’ URLs. If OpenAI, the rights holder for material from the domain chatgpt.com, asked for the exclusion of URLs from the URL pattern chatgpt.com we would probably honor that request. However, they have not made such a request.”

Spilling the tea

What’s particularly damning and juicy about these conversations is that they aren’t just links or fragments of conversations. They’re complete conversations a user might have had with ChatGPT or Grok. 

Some of the conversations Digital Digging found were quite interesting. One of which involves an Italian-speaking lawyer representing a multinational energy corporation. The conversation revealed the company’s plan to displace indigenous Amazonian communities and how the company could get the lowest possible price in its negotiations.

Then, there were a bunch of conversations by students who were using AI to help them write their research papers.

So, like we said, if you plan to share your AI conversations next time, think twice, especially if you don’t want it to appear on the internet.