Pakyong, 26 March : OpenAI issued an update revealing that the bug may have caused some personal data belonging to ChatGPT Plus subscribers to be exposed, which includes payment details.
OpenAI, a well-known AI research laboratory, temporarily suspended its ChatGPT service earlier this week after discovering a glitch that exposed some users’ chat history titles. OpenAI has now released an update stating that the bug could also have led to the exposure of certain personal information of ChatGPT Plus subscribers, such as payment information.
According to OpenAI’s recent announcement, the bug permitted specific individuals to access the first and last names of other users, their email addresses, payment addresses, the last four digits of their credit card numbers, and their credit card expiration dates. Although complete credit card numbers were not disclosed, the company admitted that some subscribers’ payment-related information may have been visible to others during a specific nine-hour period.
OpenAI mentioned in the update that after conducting a thorough investigation, they found out that the same bug that exposed chat history titles may have resulted in payment-related data being unintentionally visible for around 1.2% of active ChatGPT Plus subscribers during a specific nine-hour period.
The bug was fixed by the company, which was caused by the Redis client open-source library utilized by OpenAI to store user data in its server. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated on Twitter that the problem with ChatGPT was caused by a “bug in an open source library.”
OpenAI has contacted the impacted subscribers to inform them about the possibility of their payment information being exposed. The company believes that the number of people whose data was actually exposed is very limited, but it serves as a warning to ChatGPT users and others to be cautious when using new AI tools that are still in beta or testing stages.
ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI last year, and by January, the service had reportedly amassed 100 million active users. The success of ChatGPT has led to a surge in new AI tools and services from companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Adobe.
The ChatGPT bug became prominent after OpenAI confirmed to Bloomberg that some individuals were seeing titles from other users’ chat history instead of their own. Bloomberg observed that the content of the other users’ conversations was not visible. When a person uses ChatGPT, the chat history appears on the left-hand side of the website, enabling users to continue past conversations
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