This page was translated from Dutch with AI.
A shared chat is not a private message
You read it regularly in the news: 'ChatGPT leaks user images', or 'private conversations with AI pop up on the internet'. And then you might wonder if everything you have ever typed in a chat is floating around somewhere. I would take those kinds of messages with a pinch of salt. There is definitely something going on, only the leak is usually somewhere else than you think.
That came up in a training session, and I explained how it actually works. Because the part you control yourself is bigger than you expect.
At the bottom of this article you will find a prompt to help you check your own settings. Feel free to copy it.
Where the leak usually is
People create an image with ChatGPT, or they have a nice conversation, and they want to show it to someone. So they press share. Many people do not realise that they are creating a public link at that moment. That link goes to your image or to your entire chat. Anyone with that link can access it. And there are people with less good intentions who scour the internet for such links, looking for juicy material.
That is how entire chats have ended up on the internet that people thought were private. The AI did not leak anything there. Someone just pressed a button without knowing what that button did. We worry that the AI will spill our secrets, and then we put them on display ourselves. I often say it in my training sessions: humans are the weakest link, also with AI. And the better you know what such a button does, the less exciting those news reports become.
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