OpenAI picked April 1st to announce that it would start offering ChatGPT to people without the need to create an account. Of course, a good rule of thumb is to trust nothing you read on the internet on the first of this particular month, but this isn’t an April Fool’s Day joke: You can really start asking ChatGPT questions without needing to log into your OpenAI account, or having an OpenAI account at all.
OpenAI says it’s rolling out this accessibility gradually, so you might not see the option to jump into a ChatGPT conversation right away. But whether it’s today or next week, you will soon be able to go to chat.openai.com, click the “Message ChatGPT” text field, and ask the chatbot whatever question you like, all without the interruption of signing in. It turns ChatGPT more into a Google service than ever before: You don’t need to think about whether you’re signed into your Google Account before searching for something quickly. Now, you can apply the same logic to a ChatGPT problem, as well. (Though I wouldn’t recommend replacing Google with ChatGPT free just yet.)
There are some caveats to this more open ChatGPT accessibility: For starters, as you might expect, you only have access to GPT-3.5, which is no different than a free ChatGPT account anyway. More concerning, however, is that OpenAI uses your quick start conversations as part of its training data for its LLMs. Whatever you ask ChatGPT after booting up the bot without an account, OpenAI is feeding right back into its systems. If you want to keep your conversations out of this training data, you need to turn off this default setting, by clicking the question mark in the bottom right, choosing Settings, and disabling Improve the model for everyone.
Credit: Jake Peterson
OpenAI says it has added additional “safeguards” for this experience, and will block certain categories prompts and generations, but didn’t specify what those categories were.
In addition, you’ll also miss out on key features that account holders have by default, including chat history, sharing chats, voice conversations, and custom ChatGPT instructions. If you want any of these features when using ChatGPT, you should create and log into your account first.
