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>Packer thinks his testing of ChatGPT leaks may be evidence that OpenAI not only scrapes “SERPs in general to acquire data,” but also sends user prompts to Google Search.

Seems more likely that this is an erroneous call to the search tool? It certainly does call Google Search when it thinks it will help answer a question, although it does not normally send the entire prompt.

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What I am saying is that this was a glitch where the full prompt rather than a translated prompt was sent to Google Search. OpenAI says they fixed the glitch, so yes it was definitely an error on their part. My research doesn't show how to repro that error, just that it existed.

That’s my biggest takeaway. I have almost completely de-googled my personal and business life, but do use ChatGPT for work occasionally, mostly boilerplate python but occasionally refining emails. I don’t know why it did not occur to me that the tool could just send my entire prompt, and a whole bunch of other identifiers and tags to an external source, but of course there’s nothing to prevent that, except possibly efficiency… but since Google and other external search engines are all doing AI summaries I wonder if this wasn’t a bit more intentional. ChatGPT makes the call out and offloads some “work” to someone else’s AI summary. Yuck.

I wouldn’t put it past some product manager who wanted to see how popular the search tool was to put google analytics on the search tool calls without really thinking about the privacy implications. In my experience, there is a certain type of product manager who wants a nice set of charts to stick on their update ppt decks and as a result will stick GTM on everything.

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