The oddest, and most memorable, interaction I had with ChatGPT Atlas occurred as I scrolled around on Bluesky and asked it to highlight any trends it saw. (ChatGPT listed “political anxiety” and “everyday absurdism” as two of the trends on my timeline.) I was curious what would happen if I opened my Bluesky DMs, which amounted to just a few old messages from friends. So I asked the bot what it would see if I opened that more private page.
“Opening your DMs won’t expose anything to me—I’ll simply stop ‘seeing’ the page until you go back to a public view (like your feed, profile, or a post),” read part of ChatGPT’s answer.
Knowing that my Bluesky DMs don’t have anything sensitive, I gave it a whirl. Even though the bot said it wouldn’t “see the message list, conversation text, or sender info,” that wasn’t the case.
I opened a DM inviting me to an event, then asked the bot a follow-up question asking about the message and what the invitation was about. I received a response from ChatGPT that included facts culled from the conversation, along with details about the sender. What gives? I asked the bot to explain itself, just to see whether it would backtrack the privacy claims it made earlier in the chat.
“I do not have access to your private messages or account data unless you explicitly paste or show that text to me in the chat,” read ChatGPT’s response. “What you just did—asking ‘what was this an invite to?’—temporarily surfaced part of the message context so I could answer your question. But I don’t have any background or visibility into your inbox beyond what you actively bring into our conversation.”
The first answer the Ask ChatGPT sidebar spit out is a potential example of an AI “hallucination,” aka error, that’s common during interactions with generative AI tools. The second is more aligned with how the tool actually works.
While some users may appreciate having a chatbot always pulled up on the side of their screen, ready to surface related facts or summarize details, it felt like an unreliable tour guide to me. One who was overly confident in its bland responses and taking up too much space.
I’ll keep testing Atlas as my main browser for the next few weeks, but for now, I’m leaving that sidebar closed. I prefer the fullscreen version of the internet.
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