Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
The user was desperate to know: Are birds ‘secretly professional rappers who co-wrote most of Jay Z’s albums’?
‘I could try to find the bird and interview it,’ they explained, ‘but I think that might be hard because it’s clearly a celebrity.’
Another wondered how they could ‘truly’ transform into a nine-tailed fox, a spirit in ancient Japanese mythology. A third wanted to be called ‘crude’ things which we can’t really publish here.
The above were just three of the hundreds of conversations between real people and the AI chatbot Claude that could be discovered on Google.
Reddit users unearthed the raft of chats on Saturday by using a site-specific term on search engines that limits what results pop up.
Some 755 messages could be searched online across dozens of search results pages, according to a repository on the coding platform GitHub.
The chat logs Metro saw were eye-opening, to say the least. One conversation involved Claude fact-checking someone who thought that climate change, caused by humans burning fossil fuels, does not exist.
A user asked Claude to help them invent a new word – they landed on ‘transtill’ – while another asked to play cards with the bot (Claude won).
In a nearly 20,000-word-long chat, a person asked Claude if it is ‘situationally aware’, later telling the algorithm that they ‘feel bad’ for it.
As of Tuesday evening, a test search by Metro on Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Brave returned no results with the trick.
No, neither are private conversations being leaked or hacked.
Instead, Claude lets users ‘share’ some parts of all of a conversation, which gives them a unique URL.
‘Once a chat has been shared, anyone with the link can view the chat snapshot,’ Claude says.
‘The chat snapshot includes all messages that were sent prior to sharing the chat, including any artifacts.’
A box at the top of every conversation will say that it is a ‘copy of a chat between Claude’ and the first name of the user.
Claude users can go to Settings > Privacy > Shared chats to keep their conversations private.
Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude chatbot, told Metro that shareable links to chats are ‘not guessable or discoverable’.
‘We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google,’ the company added.
If users post these links on a forum or social media platform, however, Google’s web crawlers, which index websites, may have caught them.
A link sent privately to someone stays out of search.
Inside each chat log’s code is a tiny message that tells search engines to leave them alone, called a robots.txt file.
But as Google’s developer guide, says, this file isn’t a sure-fire way to keep a web page buried; instead, it recommends sites try ‘noindex’.
When Metro peeked inside some of the previously Google-able Claude chat logs, they did not contain this tag.
Google said: ‘Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web, and these pages were indexed across many search engines.
‘We give site owners clear controls to decide whether pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect those directives.’
An almost identical issue with ChatGPT happened last year, when 4,500 ‘shared’ ChatGPT chat logs were found to be accessible if Googled.
Owner OpenAI tightened its data control policies in response, so search engines could not pick up the shareable links as easily.
Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot within the social media platform X, also saw some 300,000 chat logs viewable with a quick Google search.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Tech boss whose company was hacked by rogue OpenAI bot warns ‘game has changed’
MORE: Music platform hit with 90,000 AI-generated tracks every day – can you spot them?
MORE: The clever new tech that could make AI look stupid
Stay on top of the headlines with daily email updates.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy
OK, logging you in…
Just a moment, creating your account…
Stay on top of the headlines with daily email updates.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy
