Source | Qubit | Public Account QbitAI
Using ChatGPT to prostitute webpages to pay for content will soon be unworkable.
Just yesterday, OpenAI announced that it temporarily disabled the official web browsing mode of ChatGPT.
Although the announcement is very cryptic, the main purpose of this feature removal is to urgently repair the loophole of "surpassing the paywall".
Corresponding prompts also appeared in the interface of ChatGPT.
Some netizens mistakenly thought that it was going to be permanently removed from the shelves, saying that they could not accept it, "It is worth paying to be able to connect to the Internet."
After learning that it was only temporarily canceled, the excitement of netizens seemed to have calmed down a bit, but they still look forward to the early return of this function.
Exposure to "steal" paid content
Previously, ChatGPT was exposed to be able to climb over the paywall and obtain hidden full text.
This is the second time ChatGPT has involved copyright issues after being exposed to using copyrighted content for training.
OpenAI did not explain the reason for this vulnerability.
However, content owners protect paid content in different ways.
Some of the paid-to-read content has already been loaded when the webpage is opened, but is only hidden through technical means.
Under normal circumstances, the browser will not display these texts directly, but even if ChatGPT is not used, there are other ways to display them.
However, ChatGPT reads the content of web pages in the form of code, and this hidden method does not work in front of ChatGPT.
But after we checked the front-end code, we found that the website mentioned in the exposure (now) does not use this loading method.
If it wasn’t for the content party’s urgent update after discovering the leakage problem, it means that there are other reasons for ChatGPT’s leakage of paid content.
Although not explained too much, OpenAI suspended ChatGPT's web browsing function this time, which is an emergency fix for this problem.
Additionally, we tested whether this restriction can be bypassed through chat history with web browsing.
As a result, the prompt "The old version of the model used in this conversation is not available" appeared, and the answer directly stated that I did not have the web browsing function.
However, some plug-ins with web browsing capabilities are still available, such as WebPilot.
In addition to OpenAI fixing this vulnerability, some paid content owners have also set up preventive measures.
For example, when we tried to access paid articles from Bloomberg with WebPilot, we were blocked by the security system.
Pageviews drop for the first time
According to statistics from Similarweb, the traffic of ChatGPT dropped for the first time last month.
The number of page views and the number of unique visitors decreased by 9.7% and 5.7% respectively from the previous month.
It can also be seen from the figure above that the growth rate of pageviews began to slow down in March, and stabilized in May, until this time there was a decline.
The length of a single visit showed a downward trend in March, and the average length of each stay decreased by about one minute.
However, compared to other products including Bing, ChatGPT's leading position in page views has not changed.
It should be noted that the above statistics only count the visits of the web page.
For API call data, third parties cannot collect statistics.
The number of visits to the OpenAI developer platform increased by 3.9% from May, but it was still less than the 140 million visits in March.
How long do you think the popularity of ChatGPT will last?
参考链接：
[1]https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1676072388436594688
[2]https://community.openai.com/t/chatgpt4-browsing-bing-disabled/286800/9
[3]https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/chatgpt-pauses-bing-integration-to-stop-people-from-bypassing-paywalls
[4]https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/14j8q1u/it_looks_like_you_can_use_chatgpt_to_bypass/
[5]https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1673090895929810945?s=20
[6]https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-traffic-drops/