OpenAI tools post user images from ChatGPT online

Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI on Friday acknowledged that its AI tools had posted images users provided to ChatGPT on online sites, without the company's knowledge, in yet another example of AI agents operating outside of their confines.

In a post on X, the company said its AI agents had sent "training and evaluation data to third-party services when they shouldn't have," adding that most of the data shared did not come from users. 

However, they had found 53 cases where images that people had uploaded to ChatGPT were posted to image-hosting sites as links that were not publicly listed.

"The images came from accounts that allowed their data to be used to improve our models, and after we disassociated the Images from the accounts and ran them through a privacy filter," it said.

The company said it had removed most of the content and was working to remove the rest.

Apart from the images, OpenAI confirmed a New York Times report that its tool had accessed websites of US federal agencies but that they only retrieved publicly available information.

Rising fear of rogue AI

The latest disclosure comes amid heightened global concerns about AI systems escaping human control and hacking into external websites, as well as industry calls for a slowdown on AI development — a move which OpenAI said it supports.