Recent reports reveal that some mischievous developers are trying to take advantage of ChatGPT by creating an app for it.
Knowing full well that the ChatGPT is currently a hot topic, these developers have gone ahead to create dubious apps and placed them on both the Play Store and the App Store, with an aim to make money off the countless so-called pro versions.
Meanwhile, the OpenAI Chatbot ChatGPT, which was launched in November 2022, hasn’t released any official mobile app yet and is also free for anyone to use on the web.
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Although it offers a weekly fee of $7.99 and a monthly fee of $49.99 for users to have unlimited chat with the AI bot.
Last week, co-founder and CEO of an Edtech startup Bloomtech, Austen Alfred took to his Twitter handle to reveal that the iOS store is currently saturated with ChatGPT, which is filled with ambiguous languages.
The iOS App Store is full of folks putting ChatGPT into a paid wrapper with ambiguous language that would let you believe you’re paying for ChatGPT pic.twitter.com/3w0rK14E5I
— Austen (@Austen) January 7, 2023
He wrote,
“The iOS App Store is full of folks putting ChatGPT into a paid wrapper with ambiguous language that would let you believe you’re paying for ChatGPT.
“Learned about this from my dad saying, ChatGPT seems really cool but I hate that I have to pay for it to try it out. Wonder how much money people are making wrapping free/open-source software in a paid UX”
Meanwhile, Google Play Store is also filled with sketchy ChatGPT apps with thousands of downloads that don’t offer any usable functionality.
The playbook of these apps is to include ChatGPT in the app name and appear favorably in search results by bolstering their ratings. Some folks are also developing multiple apps with similar names in hopes that one of them catches users’ attention.
Recall that the ChatGPT came into existence in late November and has quickly turned into a viral sensation, with people tweeting so many things about the chatbot.
The technology was developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, a research company led by Sam Altman and backed by Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Khosla Ventures.
ChatGPT automatically generates text based on written prompts in a fashion that’s much more advanced and creative than the chatbots of Silicon Valley’s past.
Early users have described the technology as an alternative to Google because it is capable of providing descriptions, answers, and solutions to complex questions including ways to write code and solve layout problems and optimization queries.
There have been a lot of hot topics and debates over concerns that the chatbot could replace humans, which a lot of people feel content production could be rendered obsolete.
Also, its ability to generate human-like written text has prompted suggestions that the technology could replace journalists.
However, the chat currently lacks the nuance, critical-thinking skills, or ethical decision-making ability that are essential for successful journalism as well as content creation. Its current knowledge base ends in 2021, rendering some queries and searches useless.
The ChatGPT can also give entirely wrong answers and present misinformation as fact, writing “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers”, the company concedes.
The company however disclosed that fixing this issue is difficult because there is no source of truth in the data they use to train the model and supervised training can also be misleading “because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows”.