My ChatGPT agent proofread a Google Doc I never asked it to open

But this particular text from BenBit (not to be confused with BenBot, my home-grown agent) gave me a start:

Small catch in your Newsletter 11-5 working doc: the teaser says Cantwell has a “three-point plan,” but the body and her announcement describe six principles. “Six-principle framework” would make them consistent. I couldn’t verify whether that teaser was used in a sent version.

Uh, what?

BenBit was referring to a draft of my latest AI newsletter in my Google Drive, and as I quickly realized, not only had BenBit seen the document, it also opened it and proofread it, all without my asking.

This caught me by surprise, but before I could dwell on what BenBit was doing in my Google Drive, I went into writer mode: Had that discrepancy in my newsletter draft made it into the final copy?

I soon figured out why BenBit thought there was a mistake. I routinely leave dangling sections of rejected copy at the tail end of my drafts, so that contradictory “three-part” statement was still sitting at the bottom of my document even though I’d corrected the final text. Confused by that editing quirk of mine, BenBit assumed I’d slipped up. No harm, no foul. 

But while BenBit hasn’t actually made any edits to my Google Doc, I was still startled that it had chosen to read it over in the first place.