OpenAI says ChatGPT users can now turn off chat histories

The company has allowed users to withhold their ChatGPT conversations from being used in training the artificial intelligence models.

With this feature, user’s conversations will no longer be saved in ChatGPT’s history sidebar.

OpenAI’s AI models will also not use that data to improve over time.

OpenAI  announced the changes in a blog post on Tuesday.

The San Francisco-based OpenAI aims to make users feel more comfortable using ChatGPT for all kinds of applications.

OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati said, “We want to move more in this direction where people who are using our products can decide how their data is being used — if it’s being used for training or not.”

OpenAI said  it will continue to train its AI models on user data by default. 

The company will also store data (including that from conversations where users have turned off the chat history) for 30 days before deleting it, to spot abusive behavior, added OpenAI.

The startup said that its software filters out personally identifiable information that comes in from users.

OpenAI is planning to launch a business subscription plan in the coming months. Under the business subscription plan, it will not train on users’ data by default.

ChatGPT is underpinned by a large language model that requires massive amounts of data to function and improve. The more data the AI model is trained on, the better it gets at detecting patterns, anticipating what will come next and generating plausible text.

OpenAI has fed ChatGPT some 300 billion words systematically scraped from the internet: books, articles, websites and posts – including personal information obtained without consent.

Scrutiny has grown over how ChatGPT and other chatbots manage hundreds of millions of users’ data, commonly used to train or improve AI.