OpenAI Links ChatGPT to Web

OpenAI has released plugins for its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, which will allow it to access third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the internet. The most intriguing plugin is OpenAI’s first-party web-browsing plugin, which allows ChatGPT to draw information from around the web to answer the diverse questions posed to it. The plugin retrieves content from the internet through the Bing search API and shows any websites it visited in crafting an answer, citing its sources in ChatGPT’s responses. However, a chatbot with net access is a risky prospect, as OpenAI’s own research has found. An experimental system built in 2021 by the AI startup, called WebGPT, sometimes quoted from unreliable sources and was incentivized to cherry-pick data from websites it expected users would find convincing. Meta’s since-disbanded BlenderBot 3.0 had access to the net, too, and quickly went off the rails, delving into conspiracy theories and offensive content when prompted with certain text.