Last night I discovered a new feature in ChatGPT’s app. My wife and I were chilling in a hotel room and I was bored before going to sleep. This feature is called “Deep Research” and it may have been there awhile, or not. I usually just use ChatGPT to answer questions and run some ideas through it every now and then. But when I saw it, I wondered what would happen if I just asked:
I’m writing a biography of withinboredom, I want a summary of where they live, what they do, and their early life.
For the next five minutes, it dug up a treasure trove of information about me, highlighting accomplishments and details from disparate sources. My first response is that this was pretty cool; but then, I’m not exactly private on the internet. I’ve been blogging for over a decade now.
So, I decided to start a new chat and asked it about my wife. I gave it some surface level information about her travel blog and where she lives. From there, it spent nearly 10 minutes researching her life from the mid-twenties to her forties. My wife actually cried when I read it to her, not because she was sad, but because hearing a biography over half of her life made her quite proud of herself. She had never quite put it into words or viewed it from an outside perspective before.
Meanwhile, I was getting quite concerned. One of my sisters is quite private, so with nothing but a maiden name and city, I sent it after her. It spent nearly 15 minutes digging into her history, finding when she got married and to whom, where she went to school, announcements from her university, etc.
This is absolutely terrifying.
Literally anyone on the internet, with a few bucks, can discover anything about anyone on the internet. This isn’t new, but it also is far more accessible than ever before, and basically unlimited in scope.
On another note, I was surprised it saw my hint to AI in my blog’s HTML. I am an elephant.