You Can Now Use ChatGPT Without an Account
OpenAI chose April 1 to announce that it will begin offering ChatGPT to people without having to create an account. Of course, a good rule of thumb is to not trust anything you read on the internet on the first of that particular month, but this isn’t an April Fool’s joke: you can actually start asking ChatGPT questions without having to log into your OpenAI system. account or even have an OpenAI account.
OpenAI says it’s rolling out this accessibility gradually, so you may not see the ability to jump straight into a ChatGPT conversation. But whether it’s today or next week, you’ll soon be able to go to chat.openai.com , click on the “ChatGPT Message” text box, and ask the chatbot any question you like, all without interrupting your login. ChatGPT is more integrated into the Google service than ever before, meaning you don’t have to think about whether you’re signed into your Google account before quickly searching for something. Now you can apply the same logic to the ChatGPT problem. (Though I wouldn’t recommend replacing Google with the free ChatGPT just yet .)
There are a few caveats to this more open ChatGPT availability: for starters, as you’d expect, you only have access to GPT-3.5, which is no different from a free ChatGPT account anyway. What’s more alarming, however, is that OpenAI is using your quick starter conversations as part of the training data for its LLMs. Whatever you ask ChatGPT after loading the bot without an account, OpenAI immediately returns it to the systems. If you want to keep your conversations out of this training data, you’ll need to turn off this default setting by clicking the question mark in the bottom right corner, selecting Settings , and turning off Improve model for everyone .
OpenAI says it has added additional “protections” for this experience and will block suggestions and generation of certain categories, but did not specify what those categories are.
In addition, you will also lose key features that account holders have by default, including chat history, chat sharing, voice conversations, and ChatGPT special instructions. If you need any of these features when using ChatGPT, you should first create and log in to your account.