This is a dark-pattern problem. A large number of people are accidentally sharing things to the general public when they intended to share them to specific people. That is one issue being flagged here. To many people, "share" means "give me a way to share to specific people", not "mark this for indexing/searching for the general public".
The difference is that on those apps it would be a miracle if your "publicly" shared post were ever seen by more than a handful of strangers. None of those send it to the front page except in very rare circumstances (going viral).
The point is not the fanout factor but the lack of limitations. A public post is such that anyone can see, without authentication. A widely shared post that requires login to see is not public. An obscure pastebin paste is public, even though it's normally seen by a handful. But you don't get to control who these handful are.
But it is different? In both Gemini and ChatGPT when you click "Share" you get a link to the post you can share. It doesn't add the chat to common "Discover" section in the app (there is no such section there). As others pointed out "Share" in Meta AI app is actually "Publish", unlike the one in other chat apps where it is, in fact, share.
The action button says "Post", which to me is pretty close to Publish
And shared ChatGPT chats are often indexed by Google, so they become public. Although I agree it's not exactly the same because of the lack of builtin discovery
“Post” is indicative for a person paying attention. For a random non tech person trying to share thing it’s just one more button to press to get the link. Note it’s very hard to share the chat while not making it public - you will need to explicitly mark it private after you posted it. I bet you for absolutely majority of users posts being public and discoverable pretty much unintended consequence of them trying to share it to someone.
As for google I assume it’s true if you post your chat somewhere (I.e Reddit). For most of shares these chats never end up being on the internet (I.e stay in private chats in messengers). So it is different again.
Overall it is pretty much predator behavior exploiting people’s need to share their chats to get them doing something unintended and good for Meta. This being said whole idea of an app with chats as posts is quite lame, so not sure if it will stick.
>And shared ChatGPT chats are often indexed by Google, so they become public. Although I agree it's not exactly the same because of the lack of builtin discovery
I didn't know this. I think I have used share button to share chats with personal stuffs with close people thinking that the chat is as close as possible to "unlisted" youtube videos. Hope that OpenAI implements something similar or even something with a password.
> And shared ChatGPT chats are often indexed by Google, so they become public.
Do you mean creating the sharing link would make the chat log public? It will be interesting to read other people's chat on a specific topic, but googling "topic site:chatgpt.com" seems to just return Custom GPT stuff.
What is the purpose of quoting "topic" as if it is a search keyword? Are you searching for this literal string in the logs? Why are you bundling it with the "site:" operator?
I got an empty search results error with your suggested turd.
I don't think this is a dark-pattern problem in the sense that I don't think it is _intentionally_ deceiving.
I think Meta fully expected this feature to be used by people who are excited about their conversation with the AI and wants to share it publicly. Just like we see with OpenAI Sora.
There's not much to win for Meta if users instead are unknowingly sharing deeply personal conversations.
> I think Meta fully expected this feature to be used by people who are excited about their conversation with the AI and wants to share it publicly.
That's really what you think? And what they think? That people are so enamored - in droves - with their exchange with a chatbot that they're trying to share it for the world to see?
Maybe I'm the old fogey who doesn't get it, but it's just hard for me to believe that this is something many people want, or something that smart people think others earnestly want. Again, I may be the outlier here, but this just sounds crazy to me.
People share AI chats all the time on Twitter, Reddit, etc.
I don't personally think the feature makes a lot of sense in Meta AI.
However it's a lot more likely their product team genuinely thought it might do, than it is likely they intentionally wanted to give users a bad experience and risk more bad press (again, Meta would benefit nothing from people sharing by mistake).
Considering that 90% of the chats I see share are people tripping over themselves to demonstrate the AI being silly and dumb, yeah they are enamored to share with the public :p
I agree. Further, these companies show us over and over again who they are, and whether it's tobacco companies, pharma, food, or oil companies they always know - in exactly the way and at the time that makes you sick to your stomach - what they're doing and who's likely to fall for it in a way that makes. The comments in this topic are feeling a bit sophist
You completely misunderstood me. I am not incredulous that people use AI, nor am I in any way doubting how it can aid all sorts of processes.
I am incredulous that a primary use case of a genAI chatbot is sharing your chat conversation publicly. It's easy to see why people would do this for genAI images, videos, or even code; I even understand some occasional sharing of a chat exchange from time to time. But routine, regular interest, from regular people, of just sharing their text chat? I do not understand that at all.
> I think Meta fully expected this feature to be used by people who are excited about their conversation with the AI and wants to share it publicly. Just like we see with OpenAI Sora.
META expectations=/= expectations of a reasonable human that has used other "share" buttons before.
Sharing to a text message is private. In contrast, sharing to social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, and LinkedIn makes the content public. The destination determines the audience.
The TYPICAL behaviour when you hit "share" on any platform is not to immediately share. It TYPICALLY gives you options to share to a variety of other sources, both public and private. It also generates a link if you want to grab the link and specifically share that.
That is the TYPICAL share behaviour. If what META is doing with their new app is obscuring this typical behaviour and a "share" click directly going to the public, that would violate the defacto behaviour users are accustomed to when using the share button.
