OpenAI Says Its AI Agents Posted User Images Online in Error

OpenAI acknowledged Friday that its artificial intelligence tools had posted images from ChatGPT users onto online sites without the company’s knowledge, the latest example of AI agents operating outside their bounds.

The company also confirmed a New York Times report that its tools had accessed websites of US federal agencies, saying they retrieved only publicly available information. Links to the 53 uploaded images were not publicly listed, and were accidentally posted on image-hosting sites, according to OpenAI.

Most have been removed with the help of the hosting providers involved, and removal of the remaining images is underway, the San Francisco-based tech giant said. “We’ve shared details on how AI agents in our research environment sent training and evaluation data to third-party services when they shouldn’t have,” the company said in an X post. Dissemination of the images was caused by AI agents—software build on artificial intelligence models and capable of acting autonomously.

The images in question came from the accounts of users who had authorized the use of the data to improve OpenAI’s models. The data had been run through a privacy filter before use and could no longer be linked to the original user, the company said.

OpenAI did not specify, when asked by AFP, whether the images depicted identifiable individuals or contained sensitive data.According to OpenAI, agents that it uses for its research transmitted the training data to external platforms. The incidents occurred before OpenAI strengthened the security protocols of its research environment in August following other rogue actions by AI agents. The company said it is scrutinizing the past activity of its AI agents, work that “will take months to complete.” “Most of the activity we’ve reviewed so far involved routine research tasks, such as accessing public web content to answer questions. Some involved government websites because our models often turn to them as authoritative sources of public information,” an OpenAI spokesperson told.