On Monday, OpenAI announced it will allow users to access its free-to-use ChatGPT generative AI chatbot without signing up for the service.
Previously, even with the free version of ChatGPT, which the GPT-3.5 AI language model presently drives, the company required users to register an account to use it. However, as previously mentioned, GPT-3.5 is generally acknowledged to give more false information than GPT-4 Turbo, which is offered in ChatGPT's premium versions.
OpenAI Drops Login Requirements
ChatGPT was first released in November 2022 and has since evolved from a tech demo to a feature-rich AI assistant, and a free version of the app has always been accessible.
As the saying goes, "You're the product," so there is no fee. Using ChatGPT, OpenAI can collect data that will aid in training future AI models. However, users who use ChatGPT for free or subscribe to ChatGPT Plus can refuse to have their data used for AI training.
Making ChatGPT available to all users could facilitate the on-ramp for users who might use it in place of Google Search or even bring in new customers by making it simple for users to use ChatGPT rapidly and upsell them to premium versions of the service.
"It's core to our mission to make tools like ChatGPT broadly available so that people can experience the benefits of AI," OpenAI posts on its blog page. "For anyone that has been curious about AI's potential but didn't want to go through the steps to set up an account, start using ChatGPT today."
Although it is against the terms of service, kids can also use ChatGPT without an account. As a result, OpenAI says it is introducing "additional content safeguards," like blocking more prompts and "generations in a wider range of categories."
AI Experts Admit Possible Drawbacks
However, the fully open method may have a few more drawbacks. AI researcher Simon Willison mentioned the possibility of automated misuse to evade payment for OpenAI's services on X, formerly Twitter, saying he wondered how their scraping prevention would work and imagined the temptation for people to abuse this as a free 3.5 API would be pretty strong.
Willison also brought up a common criticism of OpenAI, which in this case was made by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick: GPT-3.5, which is, as they have mentioned, far less capable and far more prone to making things up than the paid version of ChatGPT that uses GPT-4 Turbo, has largely shaped people's ideas about what AI models can do.
In early March, Mollick tweeted that in every group he spoke to, from business executives to scientists, including a group of accomplished people in Silicon Valley last night, much less than 20% of the crowd tried a GPT-4 class model.
