OpenAI announced on Tuesday (April 25) that it is giving users more control of their data. With its new privacy feature of chat history in ChatGPT, users now have the ability to turn off chat history to prevent conversations from being used to train and improve AI models. While this is a step towards giving users more control, it comes with the consequence of not being able to save these conversations. To monitor for abuse, OpenAI will retain unsaved chats for 30 days before they are permanently deleted.
This new feature provided by OpenAI highlights how the company is eager to get ahead of the potential regulation of AI in the near future. This was seen with the recent decision by Italy’s data protection authority to temporarily ban ChatGPT. The OpenAI update and decision to respect user information is a step in the right direction for the company.
Zachary Lipton, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, believes that a lot of users will still keep the chat history on due to the convenience it provides. Despite this, Lipton maintains that OpenAI should be trusted to keep their word on the feature. This decision is not unique to OpenAI and other tech companies, such as Microsoft, have also expressed similar approaches to anticipating regulation changes in the AI industry. This would potentially set them apart from competitors and give them an advantage going forward.
