OpenAI suspends Bing integration for ChatGPT: Background and impact

OpenAI, the organization behind the AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, has temporarily suspended its integration with Bing. This decision was made to protect the rights of publishers whose content is behind pay barriers.

Looking behind the payment barriers

ChatGPT was previously able to search the Internet using Bing and access a wide range of information. In doing so, the chatbot could also access articles that were actually behind payment barriers. This was possible because these articles are basically indexed for search engines and thus also readable. However, OpenAI has now decided to disable this feature as a precautionary measure to comply with the rights of publishers.

Impact on users

The temporary disabling of Bing integration has an impact on ChatGPT users. The “Browsing with Bing” feature was intended to keep the chatbot up-to-date, as ChatGPT is only trained with dates up to and including 2021. Now this feature is only available to paying users for the time being.

Return of the feature

OpenAI is working to bring back the Bing integration as soon as possible. However, it is not yet clear how long this will take. In the meantime, ChatGPT users will still be able to use the chatbot, but will have to do without the additional information provided by the Bing integration.

Summaries and bugs

It is important to note that the summaries that ChatGPT created using Bing did not always exactly match the content of the original articles. In some cases, arguments were misrepresented or even additional content was invented. This is a known problem with current language models and is referred to as “hallucination”.

Conclusion

The temporary suspension of Bing integration for ChatGPT shows that OpenAI is trying to respect the rights of publishers while ensuring the quality and accuracy of the information provided by ChatGPT. It remains to be seen how and when the Bing integration will be re-enabled and what impact this will have on ChatGPT users.