OpenAI is making its flagship chat AI accessible to everyone, even people who haven’t bothered to create an account. However, it won’t be the same experience — and of course all your conversations will still go to training data unless you opt out.
Starting today in a few markets and rolling out to the rest of the world, visiting chat.openai.com will no longer ask you to sign in — although you still can if you want. Instead, you’ll go directly into chat with ChatGPT, which will use the same model as logged-in users.
You can chat to your heart’s content, but be aware that you don’t have the same feature set as people with accounts. You won’t be able to save or share conversations, use custom instructions, or other things that generally have to be associated with a permanent account.
That said, you still have the option to opt out of using your chats for training (which, one suspects, undermines the whole reason the company is doing this in the first place). Just click on the tiny question mark on the bottom right, then click on “settings” and turn off the feature there. OpenAI included this helpful gif:
Image Credits: OpenAI
More importantly, this ultra-free version of ChatGPT will have “slightly more restrictive content policies.” What does this mean? I asked and received a verbose but largely meaningless response from a representative:
The disconnected experience will benefit from existing security mitigations already built into the model, such as denying harmful content. In addition to these existing mitigations, we also implement additional safeguards specifically designed to address other forms of content that may be inappropriate for a disconnected experience.
We considered the potential ways a disconnected service could be used in inappropriate ways, based on our understanding of GPT-3.5’s capabilities and the risk assessments we’ve completed.
So… really, no idea what exactly these more restrictive policies are. No doubt we’ll find out soon enough as an avalanche of rando descends on the site to hit the tires of this new offering. “We recognize that additional iteration may be needed and welcome feedback,” the spokesperson said. And they will have it — in abundance!
At this point, I also asked if they had a plan for how to handle what will almost certainly be attempts to abuse and weaponize the model on an unprecedented scale. Just think about it: a platform whose use causes a billionaire to lose money. After all, the conclusion is still expensive and even the refined low-performance GPT-3.5 model takes up server power and space. People will hammer it for what it’s worth.
For this threat they also had an honest non-response:
We’ve also looked carefully at how we can detect and stop misuse of the disconnected experience, and the teams responsible for detecting, preventing and addressing abuse have been involved throughout the design and implementation of this experience and will continue to update its design moving forward.
Notice the lack of anything resembling concrete information. They probably have as little idea what people will subject this thing to as anyone, and should be reactive rather than proactive.
It’s not clear which regions or groups will get access to the super free ChatGPT first, but it’s launching today, so check back regularly to find out if you’re among the lucky ones.
