Your public ChatGPT queries are getting indexed by Google and other search engines

If you don't want your conversations to be public, how about you don't tick the checkbook that says "make this public." This isn't OpenAI's problem, its an idiot user problem.

If you don't want corporations to use you chats as data, don't use corporate hosted language models.
Even non-public chats are archived by OpenAI, and the terms of service of ChatGPT essentially give OpenAI the right to use your conversations in any way that they choose.
You can bet they'll eventually find ways to monetize your data at some point in the future. If you think GoogleAds is powerful, wait until people's assistants are trained with every manipulative technique we've ever invented and are trying to sell you breakfast cereals or boner pills...
You can't uncheck that box except by not using it in the first place. But people will sell their soul to a company in order to not have to learn a little bit about self-hosting
- This is basically a "if you don’t want your data to be used, run your own internet" comment
  It’s just not doable for pretty much everyone
- Hi there, I’m thinking about getting into self-hosting. I already have a Jellyfin server set up at home but nothing beyond that really. If you have a few minutes, how can self-hosting help in the context of OPs post? Do you mean hosting LLMs on Ollama?
This is a case of corporation taking advantage of technically idiotic userbase, which is most of the general public. OpenAI using a dark pattern so that users can't easily unchecked that box nor making that text that says "this can be indexed by search engines" brightly visible.
- I don't think OpenAI gets anything from this, I think they just failed to realize how stupid the average person is.

I assumed this was a given. Anything offered to tech overlords will be monetized and packaged for profit at every possible angle. Nice to know it's official now, I guess.

Plus, you explicitly have to opt into this, for each chat you share individually.
I get that it says "discoverable" at first and the search engines are in the fine print, but search engine crawlers get it anyway if it's discoverable on ChatGPT's website instead. That term is plenty clear imo.

Mine are not public, i use ~~a tinfoil~~ duck.ai.

I use local Ollama. I don't trust anyone with my AI conversations.

Oh,boy. More.

Have you heard of timecube? Well here's mirrorcube

Ten times ten thousand pairs of opposite reflected extensions of you are doing the same thing - throwing the ball away from themselves toward their opposites and away from themselves, each one of each pair being the reverse of its opposite, and acting in reverse. YOU NOW KNOW WHAT THE ELECTRIC CURRENT IS, and that should tell you what RADAR is. Likewise it explains RADIO and TELEVISION. [See Principle of Regeneration, 3.13 - Reciprocals and Proportions of Motions and Substance, 7.3 - Law of Love - Reciprocal Interchange of State on Multiple Subdivisions]

It's so fucking insane

Have you heard of timecube?
No, but I've heard of þe time knife.
- Here you go
  Warning, it gets racist the deeper you read.

I mean... they are public. duh

Here's a good one

cape cod conspiracy

As for georges bank, it was made a national monument and are large ancient volanos that would be perfect for a alien base. There's also a line on google maps going from woods hole to there, and obama has a mantion off if king point road looking out into the ocean

Omfg

Yum, a nicely mixed word salad! Lmfao

I'll probably have a target on my back because I kept asking it how to replace CEOs and other executives who do literally nothing but collect a paycheck and break shit.

Update 7/31/25 4:10pm PT: Hours after this article was published, OpenAI said it removed the feature from ChatGPT that allowed users to make their public conversations discoverable by search engines. The company says this was a short-lived experiment that ultimately “introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to.”

Interesting, because the checkbox is still there for me. Don't see things having changed at all, maybe they made the fine print more white? But nothing else.

In general, this reminds me of the incognito drama. Iirc people were unhappy that incognito mode didn't prevent Google websites from fingerprinting you. Which... the mode never claimed to do, it explicitly told you it didn't do that.

For chats to be discoverable through search engines, you not only have to explicitly and manually share them, you also have to then opt in to having them appear on search machines via a checkbox.

The main criticism I've seen is that the checkbox's main label only says it makes the chat "discoverable", while the search engines clarification is in the fine print. But I don't really understand how that is unclear. Like, even if they made them discoverable through ChatGPT's website only (so no third party data sharing), Google would still get their hands on them via their crawler. This is just them skipping the middleman, the end result is the same. We'd still hear news about them appearing on Google.

This just seems to me like people clicking a checkbox based on vibes rather than critical thought of what consequences it could have and whether they want them. I don't see what can really be done against people like that.

I don't think OpenAI can be blamed for doing the data sharing, as it's opt-in, nor for the chats ending up on Google at all. If the latter was a valid complaint, it would also be valid to complain to the Lemmy devs about Lemmy posts appearing on Google. And again, I don't think the label complaint has much weight to it either, because if it's discoverable, it gets to Google one way or another.

Even through duck.ai?

ChatGPT chats are only public when turned into a shareable chat (which is a manually created snapshot of the chat with a link). And they only show up on search machines if you, after sharing, select the opt-in checkbox for having it show up there.
I don't know how duck.ai works, but I assume it doesn't do this.

Should we be surprised? Thinking AI, the most data hungry undertaking in existence, was not storing the data from what you write? Especially when the companies behind it are the most invasive in history? Lol what else

Isn't that a good thing? If more people are using it without it being indexed, search engines would end up even more useless.

I use DuckDuckGo. :)