The ChatGPT-generated avatar told the people, "Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year's convention of Protestants in Germany". Between March and April 2023, Il Foglio published one ChatGPT-generated article a day on its website, hosting a special contest for its readers in the process. In an industry survey, cybersecurity professionals argued that it was attributable to cybercriminals' increased use of generative artificial intelligence (including ChatGPT).
As of 2025, ChatGPT's website is among the top 5 most-visited websites globally, and has over 800 million active weekly users. By January 2023, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in two months. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, an ongoing period marked by rapid investment and public attention toward the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Go to youtube.com/paid_memberships at any time to view details about your membership.
In July 2024, Futurism reported that GPT-4o in ChatGPT would sometimes link "scam news sites that deluge the user with fake software updates and virus warnings"; these pop-ups can be used to coerce users into downloading malware or potentially unwanted programs. In December 2022, the question-and-answer website Stack Overflow banned the use of ChatGPT for generating answers to questions, citing the factually ambiguous nature of its responses. It found that 52% of the responses contained inaccuracies and 77% were verbose. One study analyzed ChatGPT's responses to 517 questions about software engineering or computer programming posed on Stack Overflow for correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and concision. ChatGPT has been used to generate introductory sections and abstracts for scientific articles. Andrew Ng argued that "it's a mistake to fall for the doomsday hype on AI—and that regulators who do will only benefit vested interests." Yann LeCun dismissed doomsday warnings of AI-powered misinformation and existential threats to the human race.
Juergen Schmidhuber said that in 95% of cases, AI research is about making "human lives longer and healthier and easier." He added that while AI can be used by bad actors, it "can also be used against the bad actors". A May 2023 statement by hundreds of AI scientists, AI industry leaders, and other public figures demanded that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority". Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "fathers of AI", voiced concerns that future AI systems may surpass human intelligence. OpenAI said it has taken steps to effectively clarify and address the issues raised; an age verification tool was implemented to ensure users are at least 13 years old. In late March 2023, the Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT in Italy and opened an investigation. Stanford researchers reported that GPT-4 "passes a rigorous Turing test, diverging from average human behavior chiefly to be more cooperative."
The fine-tuning process involved supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). It can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers known as hallucinations. Despite its acclaim, the chatbot has been criticized for its limitations and potential for unethical use. At the same time, its release prompted extensive media coverage and public debate about the nature of creativity and the future of knowledge work.
The term "hallucination" as applied to LLMs is distinct from its meaning in psychology, and the phenomenon in chatbots is more similar to confabulation or bullshitting. These limitations may be revealed when ChatGPT responds to prompts including descriptors of people. ChatGPT's training data only covers a period up to the cut-off date, so it lacks knowledge of recent events. OpenAI acknowledged that there have been "instances where our 4o model fell short in recognizing signs of delusion or emotional dependency", and reported that it is working to improve safety.
The Pro launch coincided with the release of the o1 model, providing unlimited access to o1 and advanced voice mode. In February 2023, OpenAI launched a premium service, ChatGPT Plus, that costs US$20 per month. In December 2024, OpenAI launched a new feature allowing users to call ChatGPT with a telephone for up to 15 minutes per month for free.
Users can upvote or downvote responses they mehico restaurant receive from ChatGPT and fill in a text field with additional feedback. The laborers were exposed to toxic and traumatic content; one worker described the assignment as "torture". To build a safety system against harmful content (e.g., sexual abuse, violence, racism, sexism), OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning around $1.32 to $2 per hour to label such content.
In The Atlantic magazine's "Breakthroughs of the Year" for 2022, Derek Thompson included ChatGPT as part of "the generative-AI eruption" that "may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity is". Samantha Lock of The Guardian noted that it was able to generate "impressively detailed" and "human-like" text. Kevin Roose of The New York Times called it "the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public". Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a large language model developed by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models.
These include, among many others, writing and debugging computer programs, composing music, scripts, fairy tales, and essays, answering questions (sometimes at a level exceeding that of an average human test-taker), and generating business concepts. It is designed to generate human-like text and can carry out a wide variety of tasks. ChatGPT is a chatbot and AI assistant built on large language model (LLM) technology.