Dozens of apps purporting to offer popular new chatbot ChatGPT have flooded both Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store – many of which charge for the free software.
OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, offer the software for free, and have not created an official app for it. The company has revealed plans to monetise the program, under the name ChatGPT Professional, but this product is yet to come to market.
Until then, the fakes have swarmed in.
An app with the dubious name of ChatGPT Chat GPT AI With GPT-3 managed to top the ‘Productivity’ charts on Apple’s App Store in numerous regions before being taken down.
An app, simply named ChatGPT by MediaVents Hindriks also appeared on Google’s Play Store, where it passed 100,000 downloads.
A number of these apps are then offering subscriptions to ‘unlock all features’, despite the free program having no such subscription model (nor locked off features).
This mirrors the glut of Wordle clones that hit both app stores in the wake of that word game’s global success.
It remains to be seen whether Apple or Google will take action to stop this from getting further out of hand.
As mentioned, OpenAI have suggested they are readying a premium version of ChatGPT, called ChatGPT Professional.
On the company’s Discord server, OpenAI said it is “starting to think about how to monetise ChatGPT” and set up a waitlist, which asks, among other questions: “At what price (per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it?”
