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OpenAI released what one employee called a “incognito mode” for its popular ChatGPT chatbot on Tuesday. This mode doesn’t save users’ chat histories or use them to improve the chatbot’s artificial intelligence.
The company, which is based in San Francisco, also said it was planning a “ChatGPT Business” contract with more data controls.
The move comes at a time when ChatGPT and the other robots it uses are getting more attention for how they handle hundreds of millions of user records, which are often used to improve AI by “training” it.
Italy banned ChatGPT last month because it might be violating people’s privacy. OpenAI could bring the service back if it met certain requirements, like giving people tools to say they don’t want their data to be used. France and Spain have also started to look into it.
OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, told Reuters that the company followed European data laws and was working with regulators to make sure this was the case.
The new features did not come about because Italy banned ChatGPT. Instead, they are the result of months of work to put users “in the driver’s seat” when it comes to collecting data.
Murati said, “We will move more and more in this direction of putting users’ privacy first.” The goal is that “nobody sees (the information) and the models are super aligned: they do what you want them to do.”
He said that user feedback has helped OpenAI make its software more reliable and lower political bias, among other things, but that the company still has problems to solve.
Users can turn off “Chat History and Training” in their settings and export their data with the new product that came out on Tuesday.
Nicholas Turley, OpenAI’s product manager, compared this choice to the “incognito” mode on Internet browsers. He said the company will keep conversations for 30 days to check for abuse before deleting them for good.
Also, the business subscription, which will be available in the next few months, will not use conversations by default to train AI models.
Microsoft Corp. has put money into OpenAI and is already selling ChatGPT to businesses. Murati says that the cloud provider’s current users will be interested in this service.
