ChatGPT appears to be everywhere these days, but there is confusion over what it actually is, how safe it is to use and how users can delete their data from the programme. Further interest comes as the chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, the company which created it, faces questions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) at a hearing in the US Senate.
In order to find out more about ChatGPT we used the programme and asked it: "What is ChatGPT?" It answered: "ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the GPT-3.5 architecture, which stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5.
"ChatGPT is designed to engage in conversation and provide responses to user prompts... using advanced natural language processing techniques."
The programme aims to simulate human-like conversation, can answer complex questions, write university essays and produce computer code when asked. But where is the information on what you ask it stored and how do you delete it?
Is ChatGPT safe to use?
ChatGPT saves your data and query history, which may be a problem if OpenAI suffer a data breach which exposes your personal data and the questions you have asked the programme.
When it comes to the safety of its answers, OpenAI has openly admitted that ChatGPT can produce biased and potentially harmful answers, but hopes to mitigate against this issue by encouraging users to give feedback.
ChatGPT has the ability to produce convincing essays and state 'facts' - which in some cases turn out to be false when fact checked. On the programme's FAQs, it states: "ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and it can occasionally produce incorrect answers. It has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 and may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content."
How to delete your data on ChatGPT
To delete your data from ChatGPT, you need to go through its data deletion process, which can be found on the website here. You can either choose to delete your entire account, choose to delete certain conversations or opt out of having your data used to improve the service.
