OpenAI is Letting Users Access ChatGPT Without an Account

OpenAI has been trying to increase the number of AI tools that are readily accessible to everyone. As part of this initiative, ChatGPT is now accessible without an account. As a result, people who would like to use ChatGPT but are reluctant to give up their personal information to make an account can still try the chatbot.

According to OpenAI, more than 100 million users use ChatGPT on a weekly basis in 185 different countries. Despite Google’s Gemini starting to gain traction, traffic tracker SimilarWeb discovered that ChatGPT, with an estimated 1.6 billion users in February, continues to be the most popular AI chatbot.

The San Francisco-based company has said that the feature will be rolled out gradually, with the intention to “make AI accessible to anyone curious about its capabilities.”

OpenAI claims to have added “additional content safeguards for this experience,” such as the ability to block prompts in a broader range of categories. However, it did not elaborate further regarding what these categories are. In a statement to Techcrunch, an OpenAI spokesperson said “We considered the potential ways in which a logged out service could be used in inappropriate ways, informed by our understanding of the capabilities of GPT-3.5 and risk assessments that we’ve completed.”

Account-free users will also not be granted complete access to the features of ChatGPT. These include the ability to save and review your chat history, share chats, custom instructions, etc. Logging in without an account also doesn’t mean that your chats won’t be used to train OpenAI models by default. You have to manually opt out of this feature by disabling it in the settings. This is something that users with an account can do as well.

To sum up, this account-free version of ChatGPT will join the basic version that can be accessed with an account and the paid tier, which grants users access to GPT-4 and the image generation tool DALL-E.