When users click "share" on a ChatGPT conversation, they think they're creating a temporary link for a friend or colleague. What they don't realize is they were also creating a permanent, searchable record of their thoughts, confessions, and sometimes illegal activities seen by Archive.org.

We've really got to start moving back to paper and pens, people.

I’m confused with this whole thing, isn’t there literally a check box to make it discoverable by search engines that the user has to opt in to? Was that not there before?

Yes, but that wording is misleading. Typical web discovery happens when a crawler finds a published link. It sounds like in this case, they're just giving each and every share link to Google etc, even if the link is not posted anywhere public.