Scammers are exploiting the widespread popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot by creating fake apps that mimic the real thing and tricking people into paying for a subscription.
The genuine ChatGPT is currently only available on the web and is free to use. However, several apps claiming to be ChatGPT have appeared on both the Google Play Store and Apple iOS Store, charging users for access.
While the beta version of ChatGPT, which was launched on November 30, 2022, does not require users to pay any fee or subscription. They are only reto create an account with a Google or Microsoft email.
Nonetheless, One of the fake apps on the Apple Store is charging $7.99 for a subscription and has been downloaded multiple times.
On the Google Play Store, a search for ChatGPT yields over 10 apps and most of them have been downloaded over 100,000 times each. Both Apple and Google have yet to take action against these fraudulent apps at the time of publication.
ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language learning model developed by OpenAI, a research firm based in San Francisco. It utilises both supervised and reinforcement machine learning techniques.
Unlike many other chatbots, it is built on a vast and sophisticated learning model. It can understand the meaning and context of messages, generating human-like responses.