ChatGPT finally has access to the latest news on the Internet, but is it a good idea?

OpenAI releases many plug-ins for ChatGPT. One of them, currently in alpha testing, allows him to retrieve information from the web to enrich his answers. Is it a good idea?

One limitation of ChatGPT is that it essentially gets stuck with these responses on dates, events, and people whose information is before September 2021. Regular updates kept the information up to date on later dates, but the AI ​​didn’t yet know how to look up data on the web on its own.

This is now possible, thanks to the plugins OpenAI added yesterday. They allow him to access external sources, databases, and even directly search for information on the web. At the moment, these options are only available in the Alpha version. These plug-ins will only be available to a limited number of developers and users who have subscribed to the plan beloved from chatbot.

Plugins will then be accessible to everyone after this testing phase. Plugin that neatly adds web search queries. If ChatGPT is deliberately restricted, it is precisely to better filter content in order to limit access to untrusted content. Knowing that despite this control ChatGPT can easily go wrong, direct access to search engines can exacerbate the phenomenon.

Troubling precedents

We remember Facebook’s unfortunate experience with its BlenderBot 3.0 chatbot which quickly got sucked into conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism due to the viral content it had access to. Similarly, in 2021 OpenAI tried to experiment with web connectivity using an artificial intelligence called WebGPT. The system, which fetches answers from the web, tends to search unreliable but popular sources.

It remains to be seen how ChatGPT will work with this new feature. Among other plug-ins, there is also a Python code interpretation function. It is able to support file upload to chatbot and can also upload generated file. This process allows files to be processed and converted from one format to another. In addition, OpenAI has made it clear that it would like to develop its own policy for ChatGPT plug-ins and allow companies, for example, to create them for their own needs.