OpenAI had to disable a ChatGPT option on Bing as it was used to bypass paywalls.
ChatGPT, an excellent tool to bypass the “paywalls” of the press on the internet? This is what internet users saw when they used the OpenAI chatbot in an original way. A very practical trick to overcome these “virtual walls” that the American laboratory has put to an end, says the message it left on Twitter on July 4, 2023.
“We’ve learned that the ChatGPT browse beta occasionally displays content in a way we don’t want, such as when a user explicitly requests the full text of a URL, [le chatbot] may inadvertently respond to this request” Written in OpenAIwhich has temporarily disabled the feature.
A flawed anti-paywall trick
This behavior was noted by Arvind Narayanan, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. in a thread June 26th. ChatGPT allows you to bypass some paywalls by asking ChatGPT to output a printable version of the text. In this case, the demonstration was in an English language publication by The Atlantic. The chatbot complied.
Paywalls can be viewed as shadow fees. They are introduced by press publishers to encourage Internet users to purchase or subscribe to the article by hiding all or part of the article’s content. Publisher policies regarding these paywalls vary. Some offer a few items before blocking, some don’t.
The scientist noted that the text rendered by ChatGPT was accurate except for a few missing sentences and a few typos. “He didn’t invent anything,” he insisted — an important clarification given that the chatbot has been known to lie in certain situations. However, the person pointed out that this option is not available in the basic version of ChatGPT (running GPT-3.5), but in the advanced version (running GPT-4).
The advanced version of ChatGPT costs $20 per month. This gives us access to OpenAI’s most advanced GPT language model, access to plugins (in beta) and online browsing (also in beta). These special features were announced earlier this year – in February for navigation, with rollout starting in May.
The fact that ChatGPT can bypass some paywalls and not others is due to the way these virtual walls are designed. Some press publishers opt for flexible settings that can be easily circumvented – for example, by disabling the JavaScript language in the Internet user’s browser. Other media, on the other hand, follow much stricter guidelines.
In the case of The Atlantic It seems that’s how the paywall works : The article is first transmitted in full, then the paywall is applied on the client side. In fact, it is possible to prevent it from running by blocking scripts in your browser. Other media, such as the Wall Street Journal, incorporate the paywall directly into the article that is sent to the internet user.
Therefore, it was not difficult for ChatGPT to read the article about Bing, possibly about the website cache stored by Microsoft’s search engine. It’s this behavior that kills OpenAI. “We’re disabling browsing while we fix this issue — we want to do what’s right for content owners,” the lab said.
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