DON’T BE EVIL: Google Search caught publicly indexing users’ conversations with Bard AI.

Google Bard, the search giant’s conversational AI product, underwent a big update last week that earned mixed reviews. But this week, another, older Bard feature is coming under scrutiny: SEO consultant Gagan Ghotra observed that Google Search had begun to index shared Bard conversational links into its search results pages, potentially exposing information users meant to be kept contained or confidential.

This means that if a person used Bard to ask it a question — possibly even a question related to the contents of their private emails — then shared the link with a designated third-party, say, their spouse, friend or business partner, the conversation accessible at that link could in turn be scraped by Google’s crawler and show up publicly, to the entire world, in its Search Results.

On X (formerly Twitter), Ghotra posted a screenshot of evidence of several Bard conversations being indexed by Google Search.

Don’t trust Google.

Related: Huge new ChatGPT update highlights the dangers of AI hype.

Dr. John Licato, an AI researcher and computer science professor, said that this push into more modalities has been expected for a while and could lead to a litany of powerful applications. His concern, however, is that OpenAI has kept its models closed off so that researchers remain unable to understand the actual capabilities of these models.

“What worries me is that these new releases are coming under OpenAI’s business model, which is not very open at all,” Licato told TheStreet. “So long as OpenAI refuses to disclose the data they use to train their models, and the ways in which they update their models with user interaction data, we can never have any substantial guarantee of their safety.”

If OpenAI won’t tell it’s because they don’t want you to know.