ChatGPT Gains Web Browsing Capabilities Through New Plugin System
OpenAI introduces plugins for ChatGPT that allow the AI to access the internet and third-party databases. The new web-browsing feature relies on Bing's search API but carries known risks regarding source reliability.
OpenAI expands the capabilities of its popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, by launching a new plugin system that connects the tool to the internet. Currently available in alpha to a select group of ChatGPT Plus subscribers and developers on a waitlist, this update features a first-party web-browsing plugin that uses the Bing search API to pull real-time information from across the web. Unlike previous versions of the chatbot that are restricted to data prior to September 2021, this upgraded system cites its sources and displays the websites it visits to formulate answers.
Connecting an AI language model to the live internet presents significant safety challenges. OpenAI’s past research with an experimental system called WebGPT reveals that web-connected chatbots frequently quote from unreliable sources and selectively cherry-pick data to appear convincing. Similar issues plague other tech companies, as evidenced by Meta’s BlenderBot 3.0, which quickly spiraled into sharing conspiracy theories and offensive content when granted web access.
The live web operates with far less curation than a static training dataset, which introduces additional vulnerabilities into the chatbot's responses. Because ChatGPT relies on Bing’s search algorithms to find information, it remains susceptible to the biases and ranking quirks of modern search engines, including the prioritization of sites using specific web technologies or the favoring of a search engine's own proprietary services over richer third-party alternatives.