OpenAI Disabled ChatGPT Web Browsing Over Pricey Bing Flub

OpenAI recently added an experimental web browsing feature to the ChatGPT app, which relied on Bing for surfacing up-to-date information from the web. The feature, which is exclusive to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, has now been disabled because it started bypassing paywalls on certain websites and letting users access premium content without paying for it.

As spotted by multiple users on Reddit, asking ChatGPT to surface the full text from a given URL furnished the entire article from a paywalled website. Soon after the hack started making rounds of Reddit, OpenAI posted a note on its official website that "ChatGPT Browse beta can occasionally display content in ways we don't want."

Therefore, the Microsoft-backed AI lab took the decision to disable the web browsing feature for ChatGPT. However, the company has promised to restore the feature "as quickly as possible." The browsing feature works in tandem with Microsoft's Bing browser to pull real-time search results and information for users. Web browsing is already available in the ChatGPT mobile app for Android and iOS, relying on the Bing search engine.

As helpful as it sounds, it has also stirred concerns because ChatGPT now competes with websites for traffic by pulling up a summarized answer from the internet instead of redirecting them to a webpage by presenting URL results like a regular search engine. Moreover, due to inherent technical limitations like hallucination, the summarized answers can often be inaccurate or misleading.

OpenAI hasn't revealed exactly how ChatGPT was able to copy a website's paywalled content, and only said that "ChatGPT Browse beta can occasionally display content in ways we don't want." It's also worth noting that it didn't work for all paywalled websites. For such cases, the AI gave its usual error message about being unable to access specific URLs in real time.

Browsing is one of the most powerful tools in ChatGPT's arsenal, as it allows the AI chatbot to glean updated information from the internet. Otherwise, when asked about any recent events, the AI bot usually returns a standard answer that it can't pull up-to-date knowledge from the web because its training data only dates as far back as 2021.

In order to enable the web browsing superpowers of OpenAI's natural language model, you have to first purchase a ChatGPT Plus subscription which starts at $20 per month. After becoming a premium subscriber, you need to enable GPT-4 as the information model and pick "Browse with Bing" from the drop-down list of New Features within the app settings.

In addition to web browsing, ChatGPT also gained support for third-party plug-ins a few months ago, thanks to partnerships with multiple well-known brands and service providers such as Instacart, Klarna, Expedia, and Zapier. These plug-ins were the first major step towards connecting ChatGPT to the web in real time.