ChatGPT could watch you all the time: Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has hinted at where his AI, ChatGPT, could be in the next six months. What he revealed sounds more personal than what conventional AI does, writing emails or summarising a document.

In an interview, Altman revealed what he called the “decentdence of ChatGPT,” which could watch your computer screen, meetings you’re in, calls, and record everything “all the time.”

This will make the AI a more capable version that can continuously understand what a person is doing on their computer and use that context to help them throughout the day.

“You can also easily connect services such as email, texts, documents and Slack to the AI. While this futuristic version may sound exciting, it could also be scary when viewed from a surveillance perspective,” says Altman.

However, he explained, the idea is that users would decide what information the AI is allowed to access. Instead of making decisions for the user, the AI would work alongside them and use that huge amount of context to offer suggestions or take care of smaller tasks.

For example, if you were writing a sales pitch, the AI could recognise the customer history, previous conversations and relevant documents before suggesting what you should change. While writing a strategy document, it could also point out a possible mistake or suggest another idea.

Altman said the AI could effectively become an extra pair of hands for people who already have too much information to keep track of. “If you’re like the CEO of a startup, there’s always like more stuff to do than you can do,” he said. “And context, you can’t all keep track of.”

The comments come days after OpenAI introduced Computer History for the ChatGPT desktop app on Mac.

The feature allows ChatGPT to keep track of activity across selected apps and websites, giving it more context about what a user has been doing. Instead of relying on screenshots, OpenAI says Computer History uses activity data available through macOS accessibility features, including clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts and switching between apps.

Users have to turn the feature on themselves and can decide which apps and websites contribute to the history. They can also pause collection or delete the stored activity.

That current feature is much narrower than the future Altman described, but the direction is similar: give ChatGPT more context about what you are doing so it can become more powerful than without requiring you to explain everything from scratch. And Altman appears to think the leap to something much more capable may not be far away.