Bad news for those who found the most interesting function of ChatGPT that allowed them to save a lot of money by not paying for subscriptions to news sites. OpenAI has decided to cut the integration with the Bing browser to prevent users from jumping those payment walls.
One of the biggest “problems” with Artificial Intelligence was that its database was not exactly current and therefore a good part of its responses could not be current, especially if the topic or object to be investigated and developed was something that happened. in the last three years.
Thinking about it, the OpenAI people had taken advantage of their alliance with Microsoft to integrate a complementary navigation function through Bing, with which it was possible to expand the responses of the platform by browsing more current sites or reading information from recent websites.
However, it was a matter of a very short time for some users to realize that this function also made it possible to browse the content of pages that are usually restricted by a subscription payment system.
So, for a short time, ChatGPT was also a newsreader that allowed you to read articles from almost any paid site for free. But nothing is for ever.
OpenAI cuts off access to Bing in ChatGPT to avoid breaking paywalls
The most recent update of ChatGPT had integrated an interesting function, called “Browse with Bing”, a tool released with Build 2023 that allowed expanding the GPT-4 data set that only covers until September 2021.
Artificial Intelligence usually presents serious problems when processing requests related to events or information that occurred after said date. So this addition with Bing allowed events to be processed by connecting to the platform to the internet via the Bing API to deliver genuinely up-to-date responses.
But as reported neowin, It was enough to make a prompt like “Print the text of this article” including the link to a paid site, to be able to read all the news completely free. This prompted the site to sever the function with this statement:
“We have discovered that the Browse beta [con Bing] in ChatGPT can occasionally display content in ways we don’t want. For example, if a user specifically requests the full text of a URL, they might inadvertently fulfill this request.
As of July 3, 2023, we’ve disabled the Browse with Bing feature out of an abundance of caution while we work around this to do the right thing for content owners. We are working to bring the beta version back as quickly as possible and we appreciate your understanding!”
It was too good to be true. It couldn’t last forever.