OpenAI LP, the company behind the wildly successful ChatGPT, has suspended a browsing feature in the generative artificial intelligence chatbot that allowed paying users to obtain search results through Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine, ostensibly because the feature bypasses paywalls.

Called “Browse with Bing,” the feature was launched for ChatGPT Plus customers in March and was pitched at the time as allowing paying users to obtain up-to-date information and search the internet. ChatGPT, without the feature, is restricted to finding information it was trained on — publicly available data on the internet as it was at the end of 2021.

According to an update on an OpenAI help page, the company has strangely come to the conclusion that allowing people to bypass paywalls is bad.

“We have learned that the ChatGPT Browse beta can occasionally display content in ways we don’t want. For example, if a user specifically asks for a URL’s full text, it might inadvertently fulfill this request,” the help page reads. “As of July 3, 2023, we’ve disabled the Browse with Bing beta feature out of an abundance of caution while we fix this in order to do right by content owners.”

There’s one small problem with OpenAI’s premise: Not only is it publicly available data, but there are also free services and plugins that already deliver the same thing. The “archive.today” service, for example, easily bypasses paywalls by gaining access to a site as a first visitor, avoiding restrictions such as a person being able to read a site only a certain number of times in a month without subscribing.

Paying ChatGPT users are not happy, with one writing on OpenAI’s community page, “It seems like OpenAI is working against the paid users of ChatGPT Plus. This time they’re taking away Browsing because it reads the content of a site that the user asks for? Please, that’s what I pay for Plus for. It’s not for the 3.5, but rather, for the measly 25 messages/3 hours.” That last refers to the free version of ChatGPT, 3.5, versus the more advance and paid-for version of ChatGPT, 4.0.

Although ChatGPT cannot search the internet for the time being, the same can’t be said for its competitor, Google LLC’s Bard. The Google service, which is currently free, has no issues browsing the web and bypassing paywalls.

That this has somehow become an issue for ChatGPT is strange and the longer OpenAI restricts the service, the more likely its paying users will seek out alternatives. Even Microsoft Corp.’s Bing Chat, which is powered by ChatGPT, can search the web, but OpenAI’s paying customers cannot.

Image: OpenAI