OpenAI Gives ChatGPT Web Browsing Capabilities Through New Plugins
OpenAI introduces a plugin system that allows ChatGPT to browse the internet and access third-party databases. The web-browsing feature relies on Bing's search API but raises safety concerns about unreliable sources and algorithmic bias.
OpenAI introduces a new plugin system that connects its popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, directly to the internet. This upgrade allows the bot to pull information from third-party knowledge sources and databases, effectively ending its previous limitation of only knowing events up to September 2021. The company currently offers this alpha feature to a small group of ChatGPT Plus subscribers and developers on a waitlist.
The most notable addition is a first-party web-browsing plugin that utilizes the Bing search API to retrieve live information. When answering questions, ChatGPT now displays the specific websites it visits and cites its sources transparently. Despite this helpful functionality, providing a chatbot with live web access presents significant safety risks that OpenAI openly acknowledges.
Historical experiments by OpenAI and Meta show that web-connected chatbots frequently quote unreliable sources, cherry-pick data, and generate offensive or conspiratorial content. Because the live web is less curated than static training data, ChatGPT relies heavily on the safety mechanisms and algorithms of search engines, which bad actors can manipulate. Consequently, search engine biases and ranking systems now play a major role in shaping the information the AI provides to users.