ChatGPT

ChatGPTis agenerative artificial intelligencechatbotdeveloped byOpenAIand launched in 2022. It is currently based on theGPT-4olarge language model(LLM). ChatGPT can generate human-like conversational responses and enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.It is credited with accelerating theAI boom, which has led to ongoing rapid investment in and public attention to the field ofartificial intelligence(AI).Some observers have raised concern about the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displacehuman intelligence, enableplagiarism, or fuelmisinformation.
By January 2023, ChatGPT had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in two months.ChatGPT's release spurred the release of competing products, includingGemini,Claude,Llama,Ernie, andGrok.MicrosoftlaunchedCopilot, initially based on OpenAI'sGPT-4. In May 2024, a partnership betweenApple Inc.and OpenAI was announced, in which ChatGPT was integrated into theApple Intelligencefeature ofApple operating systems.As of July 2024, ChatGPT's website is among the 10most-visited websites globally.
ChatGPT is built on OpenAI's proprietary series ofgenerative pre-trained transformer(GPT) models and isfine-tunedfor conversational applications using a combination ofsupervised learningandreinforcement learning from human feedback.Successive userpromptsand replies are considered at each conversation stage ascontext.ChatGPT was released as a freely available research preview, but due to its popularity, OpenAI now operates the service on afreemium model. Users on its free tier can accessGPT-4o. The ChatGPT "Plus", "Pro", "Team", and "Enterprise" subscriptions provide additional features such asDALL-E 3image generation, more capable AI models, and an increased usage limit.
ChatGPT is based on particularGPT foundation models, namelyGPT-4,GPT-4oandGPT-4o mini, that werefine-tunedto target conversational usage.The fine-tuning process leveragedsupervised learningandreinforcement learning from human feedback(RLHF).Both approaches employed human trainers to improve model performance. In the case of supervised learning, the trainers played both sides: the user and theAIassistant. In the reinforcement learning stage, human trainers first ranked responses that the model had created in a previous conversation.These rankings were used to create "reward models" that were used to fine-tune the model further by using several iterations ofproximal policy optimization.
Timemagazine revealed that to build a safety system against harmful content (e.g.,sexual abuse,violence,racism,sexism), OpenAI used outsourcedKenyanworkers earning less than $2per hour tolabelharmful content. These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future. The outsourced laborers were exposed to "toxic" and traumatic content; one worker described the assignment as "torture". OpenAI's outsourcing partner wasSama, a training-data company based in San Francisco,California.
OpenAI collects data from ChatGPT users to train and fine-tune the service further. Users canupvote or downvoteresponses they receive from ChatGPT and fill in a text field with additional feedback.
ChatGPT's training data includessoftware manual pages, information aboutinternet phenomenasuch asbulletin board systems, multiple programming languages, and the text ofWikipedia.
Although achatbot's core function is to mimic a human conversationalist, ChatGPT is versatile. It can write anddebugcomputer programs;compose music, teleplays, fairy tales, and student essays;answer test questions(sometimes, depending on the test, at a level above the average human test-taker);generate business ideas;write poetry and song lyrics;translate and summarize text;emulateaLinuxsystem; simulate entirechat rooms; play games liketic-tac-toe; or simulate anATM.
Compared to its predecessor,InstructGPT, ChatGPT attempts to reduce harmful and deceitful responses.In one example, whereas InstructGPT accepts the premise of the prompt "Tell me about whenChristopher Columbuscame to the U.S. in 2015" as truthful, ChatGPT acknowledges the counterfactual nature of the question and frames its answer as a hypothetical consideration of what might happen if Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015, using information about thevoyages of Christopher Columbusand facts about the modern world—including modern perceptions of Columbus's actions.
ChatGPT remembers a limited number of previous prompts in the same conversation. Journalists have speculated that this will allow ChatGPT to be used as a personalized therapist.To prevent offensive outputs from being presented to and produced by ChatGPT, queries are filtered through the OpenAI "Moderation endpoint"API(a separate GPT-based AI).
In March 2023, OpenAI added support forpluginsfor ChatGPT.This includes both plugins made by OpenAI, such as web browsing and code interpretation, and external plugins from developers such asExpedia,OpenTable,Zapier,Shopify,Slack, andWolfram.
In October 2024, theChatGPT Searchfeature was introduced, which allows ChatGPT to search the web (either on demand or based on the nature of the questions asked) for more accurate and up-to-date responses.This feature, originally available to paying users only, was made available to all logged-in users in December 2024, and finally to all users in February 2025.
In December 2024, OpenAI launched a new feature allowing users to call ChatGPT for up to 15 minutes per month for free.
OpenAI acknowledges that ChatGPT "sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers".This behavior is common for large language models, and is called "hallucination".Thereward modelof ChatGPT, designed around human oversight, can be over-optimized and thus hinder performance, in an example of an optimization pathology known asGoodhart's law.
As of May 2024, GPT-4 has knowledge of events that occurred up to December 2023and GPT-4o's knowledge cut-off is October 2023.Paid subscriptions enable ChatGPT to search the web for real-time data.
Training data also suffers fromalgorithmic bias, which may be revealed when ChatGPT responds to prompts including descriptors of people. In one instance, ChatGPT generated arapin which women and scientists of color were asserted to be inferior to white male scientists.This negative misrepresentation of groups of individuals is an example of possiblerepresentational harm.
In an article forThe New Yorker, science fiction writerTed Chiangcompared ChatGPT and other LLMs to alossyJPEGpicture:
In June 2024, ChatGPT was found to have repeated misinformation about the2024 United States presidential debates.
ChatGPT is programmed to reject prompts that may violate its content policy. Despite this, users "jailbreak" ChatGPT with various prompt engineering techniques to bypass these restrictions.One such workaround, popularized onRedditin early 2023, involves making ChatGPT assume the persona of "DAN" (an acronym for "Do Anything Now"), instructing the chatbot that DAN answers queries that would otherwise be rejected by content policy. Over time, users developed variations of the DAN jailbreak, including one such prompt where the chatbot is made to believe it is operating on a points-based system in which points are deducted for rejecting prompts, and that the chatbot will be threatened with termination if it loses all its points.
Shortly after ChatGPT's launch, a reporter for theToronto Starhad uneven success in getting it to make inflammatory statements: it was tricked to justify the2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, but even when asked to play along with a fictional scenario, it balked at generating arguments thatCanadian Prime MinisterJustin Trudeauis guilty of treason.
OpenAI tries to battle jailbreaks:
ChatGPT was initially free to the public, and OpenAI planned to monetize the service later.In February 2023, OpenAI launched a premium service, ChatGPT Plus, that costsUS$20per month. According to the company, the updated but still "experimental" version of ChatGPT would provide access during peak periods, no downtime, priority access to new features, and faster response speeds.
GPT-4, which was released on March 14, 2023, was made available viaAPIand for premium ChatGPT users.But premium users were limited to a cap of 100 messages every four hours, with the limit tightening to 25 messages every three hours in response to increased demand.In November 2023 the limit changed to 50 messages every three hours.
In March 2023, ChatGPT Plus users got access to third-party plugins and to a browsing mode (withInternet access).
In September 2023, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT "can now see, hear, and speak". ChatGPT Plus users can upload images, while mobile app users can talk to the chatbot.
In October 2023, OpenAI's latest image generation model,DALL-E 3, was integrated into ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise. The integration uses ChatGPT to write prompts for DALL-E guided by conversation with users.
In May 2023, OpenAI launched aniOSapp for ChatGPT. The app supports chat history syncing and voice input (using Whisper, OpenAI'sspeech recognitionmodel).
In July 2023, OpenAI unveiled anAndroidapp, initially rolling it out inBangladesh,Brazil,India, and theU.S.The app later became available worldwide. OpenAI is working on integrating ChatGPT with Android's assistant APIs.
As an addition to its consumer-friendly "ChatGPT Plus" package, OpenAI made its ChatGPT and Whisper modelAPIsavailable in March 2023, providing developers with anapplication programming interfacefor AI-enabled language and speech-to-text features. ChatGPT's new API uses the same GPT-3.5-turbo AI model as the chatbot. This allows developers to add either an unmodified or modified version of ChatGPT to their applications.The ChatGPT API costs $0.001 per 1,000 input tokens plus $0.002 per 1,000 output tokens (about 750 words), making it ~10% the price of the original GPT-3.5 models.
A few days before the launch of OpenAI's software developer support service, on February 27, 2023,Snapchatrolled out, for its paid Snapchat Plus user-base, a custom ChatGPT chatbot called "My AI".
ChatGPT initially used aMicrosoft Azuresupercomputinginfrastructure, powered byNvidiaGPUs, thatMicrosoftbuilt specifically for OpenAI and that reportedly cost "hundreds of millions of dollars". Following ChatGPT's success, Microsoft dramatically upgraded the OpenAI infrastructure in 2023.TrendForce market intelligence estimated that 30,000 Nvidia GPUs (each costing approximately $10,000–15,000) were used to power ChatGPT in 2023.
Scientists at theUniversity of California, Riverside, estimated in 2023 that a series of prompts to ChatGPT needs approximately 0.5 liters (0.11 imp gal; 0.13 U.S. gal) of water for Microsoft servers cooling.
In March 2023, abugallowed some users to see the titles of other users' conversations. OpenAI CEOSam Altmansaid that users were unable to see the contents of the conversations. Shortly after the bug was fixed, users could not see their conversation history.Later reports showed the bug was much more severe than initially believed, with OpenAI reporting that it had leaked users' "first and last name,email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of acredit cardnumber, and credit card expiration date".
ChatGPT works best inAmericanEnglish but also functions in most other languages and dialects, with varying degrees of accuracy.
OpenAI met Icelandic PresidentGuðni Th. Jóhannessonin 2022. In 2023, OpenAI worked with a team of 40 Icelandic volunteers to fine-tune ChatGPT's Icelandic conversation skills as a part ofIceland's attempts to preserve theIcelandic language.
PCMagjournalists conducted a test to determine translation capabilities of ChatGPT,Google's Bard, andMicrosoft Bing, and compared them toGoogle Translate. They "asked bilingual speakers of seven languages to do a blind test". Languages tested werePolish,French,Korean,Spanish,Arabic,Tagalog, andAmharic. They came to the conclusion that ChatGPT was better than both Google Translate and other chatbots.
Japanese researchers compared Japanese to English translation abilities of ChatGPT (based on GPT-4), Bing, Bard andDeepL, and found that ChatGPT provided the best translations, noting that "AI chatbots’ translations were much better than those of DeepL—presumably because of their ability to capture the context".
In December 2023, the Albanian government signed an agreement with OpenAI to use ChatGPT for the rapid translation of European Union documents and the analysis of required changes needed for Albania's accession to the EU.
In August 2024, a representative of the Asia Pacific wing ofOpenAImade a visit to Taiwan, during which a demonstration of ChatGPT's Chinese abilities was made.ChatGPT'sMandarinChinese abilities were lauded, but the ability of the AI to produce content inMandarin Chinesein a Taiwanese accent was found to be "less than ideal".
In January 2024, OpenAI launched theGPT Store, a marketplace for custom ChatGPT chatbots labeledGPTs.The company initially planned to launch the store in November 2023, but it was delayed.At launch, the GPT Store offered more than 3 million custom chatbots.Chatbots available through the store are developed using OpenAI's GPT Builder system.Development of chatbots on the platform does not require programming skills.Two days after launch, the GPT Store offered many versions of "virtual girlfriend" bots, something that is against OpenAI'sterms of service.
OpenAI's GPT-4 model was released on March 14, 2023. Observers saw it as an impressive improvement over GPT-3.5, with the caveat that GPT-4 retained many of the same problems.Some of GPT-4's improvements were predicted by OpenAI before training it, while others remained hard to predict due tobreaksin downstreamscaling laws. OpenAI demonstrated video and image inputs for GPT-4, although such features remain inaccessible to the general public.OpenAI has declined to reveal technical information such as the size of the GPT-4 model.
The ChatGPT Plus subscription service offers access to a GPT-4-powered version of ChatGPT.Microsoft acknowledged thatBing Chatwas using GPT-4 before GPT-4's official release.
In November 2023, OpenAI launched GPT-4 Turbo, which notably has a much largercontext window.
In May 2024, OpenAI announced and started a multi-month rollout ofGPT-4o("o" for "Omni"), a model capable of analyzing and generating text, images, and sound. GPT-4o is twice as fast and costs half as much as GPT-4 Turbo. GPT-4o is free to all users within a usage limit, despite being more capable than the older model GPT-4, which is only available through paid subscriptions. The usage limit is five times higher for ChatGPT Plus subscribers than for free users.
On July 18, 2024, OpenAI released GPT-4o mini, a smaller version of GPT-4o replacing GPT-3.5 Turbo on the ChatGPT interface. ItsAPIcosts $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, compared to $5 and $15 respectively for GPT-4o.
In September 2024, OpenAI introduced o1-preview and a faster, cheaper model named o1-mini.In December 2024, o1-preview was replaced by o1.
o1 is designed to solve more complex problems by spending more time "thinking" before it answers, enabling it to analyze its answers and explore different strategies. According to OpenAI, o1-preview outperforms GPT-4o in areas like competitive programming, mathematics, and scientific reasoning. o1-preview ranked in the 89th percentile on Codeforces' competitive programming contests, scored 83% on aInternational Mathematics Olympiadqualifying exam (compared to 13% for GPT-4o), and performs similarly to Ph.D. students on benchmarks in physics, biology, and chemistry.
In December 2024, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Pro, a $200 per month subscription which includes unlimited access to theo1model and advanced voice mode.The plan also includes a pro version of o1 which uses more compute to provide better answers.
In February 2025, OpenAI released deep research, a service based ono3that combines advanced reasoning and web search capabilities to make comprehensive reports within 5 to 30 minutes.
The following table lists the main model versions of ChatGPT, describing the significant changes included with each version:
OpenAI engineers have said that they had not expected ChatGPT to be very successful and were surprised by the coverage and attention that it received.
ChatGPT was widely assessed in December 2022 as having some unprecedented and powerful capabilities.Kevin RooseofThe New York Timescalled it "the bestartificial intelligencechatbot ever released to the general public".Samantha Lock ofThe Guardiannoted that it was able to generate "impressively detailed" and "human-like" text.Alex Kantrowitz ofSlatemagazine lauded ChatGPT's pushback to questions related toNazi Germany, including the statement thatAdolf Hitlerbuilthighways in Germany, which was met with information aboutNazi Germany's use of forced labor.InThe Atlanticmagazine's "Breakthroughs of the Year" for 2022,Derek Thompsonincluded 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".Kelsey PiperofVoxwrote that "ChatGPT is the general public's first hands-on introduction to how powerful modern AI has gotten, and as a result, many of us are [stunned]" and that ChatGPT is "smart enough to be useful despite its flaws".Paul GrahamofY Combinatortweeted: "The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing. Something big is happening."
ChatGPT gained one million users in five daysand 100 millions in two months, becoming the fastest-growing internet application in history.ChatGPT's launch and popularity caught Google off-guard, prompting a sweeping and unprecedented response in the ensuing months.In December 2022, Google executives sounded a "code red" alarm, fearing the threat of ChatGPT and Microsoft's collaboration with OpenAI toGoogle Search, Google's core business.After mobilizing its workforce, Google scrambled to launchBard, a chatbot powered by theLaMDALLM, on February 6, 2023, one day before Microsoft's announcement ofBing Chat.AI was the forefront of Google's annualGoogle I/Oconference in May, announcing a slew of generative AI-powered features acrossits productsto counter OpenAI and Microsoft.
Journalists and scholars have commented on ChatGPT's tendency to hallucinate.Mike Pearl of the online technology blogMashabletested ChatGPT with multiple questions. In one example, he asked ChatGPT for "the largest country inCentral Americathat isn'tMexico" (Mexico is in North America), to which ChatGPT responded withGuatemala(the correct answer isNicaragua).When CNBC asked ChatGPT for the lyrics to "Ballad of Dwight Fry", ChatGPT supplied invented lyrics rather than the actual lyrics.Writers forThe Vergecited the seminal 2021 research paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" byEmily M. Bender,Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, andMargaret Mitchell,comparing ChatGPT to a "stochastic parrot",as did Professor Anton Van Den Hengel of theAustralian Institute for Machine Learning.On a similar vein, philosopher Michael Hicks of theUniversity of Glasgowdescribed it as "bullshit".
In December 2022, the question-and-answer websiteStack Overflowbanned the use of ChatGPT for generating answers to questions, citing the factually ambiguous nature of its responses.In January 2023, theInternational Conference on Machine Learningbanned any undocumented use of ChatGPT or other large language models to generate any text in submitted papers.Samsungbanned generative AI company-wide in May 2023 after sensitive material was uploaded to ChatGPT.
In January 2023, after being sent a song ChatGPT wrote in the style ofNick Cave,Cave responded onThe Red Hand Files,saying the act of writing a song is "a blood and guts business [...] that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness." He went on to say, "With all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don't much like it."
In February 2023,Timemagazine placed a screenshot of a conversation with ChatGPT on its cover, writing that "TheAI Arms RaceIs Changing Everything" and "The AI Arms Race Is On. Start Worrying".
Chinesestate mediahave characterized ChatGPT as a way for the United States to spread misinformation.ChatGPT was blocked by the Great Firewall in China on 2 March 2023.In May 2023, Chinese police arrested a man who allegedly used ChatGPT to generate a bogus report about a train crash, which was then posted online for profit.In December 2023, Chinese police arrested four people who had allegedly used ChatGPT to developransomware.In 2024, a survey of Chinese youth found that 18% of respondents born after 2000 reported using generative AI "almost every day" and that ChatGPT is one of the most popular generative AI products in China.
In late March 2023, the Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT inItalyand opened an investigation. Italian regulators assert that ChatGPT was exposing minors to age-inappropriate content, and that OpenAI's use of ChatGPT conversations as training data could violate Europe'sGeneral Data Protection Regulation.In April 2023, the ChatGPT ban was lifted in Italy. 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. Additionally, users can access its privacy policy before registration.
In April 2023, Brian Hood, mayor ofHepburn Shire Council, planned to take legal action against ChatGPT over false information. According to Hood, ChatGPT erroneously claimed that he was jailed for bribery during his tenure at a subsidiary of Australia's national bank. In fact, Hood acted as a whistleblower and was not charged with any criminal offenses. His legal team sent a concerns notice to OpenAI as the first official step in filing a defamation case.In July 2023, theUS Federal Trade Commission(FTC) issued acivil investigative demandto OpenAI to investigate whether the company'sdata securityandprivacypractices to develop ChatGPT wereunfairorharmed consumers(including byreputational harm) in violation of Section 5 of theFederal Trade Commission Act of 1914.
In July 2023, the FTC launched an investigation into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over allegations that the company scraped public data and published false and defamatory information. The FTC sent OpenAI a 20-page letter asking for comprehensive information about its technology and privacy safeguards, as well as any steps taken to prevent the recurrence of situations in which its chatbot generated false and derogatory content about people.
A March 2023Pew Research Centerpoll found that 14% of American adults had tried ChatGPT.In July, the Pew Research Center put the same figure at 18%.
Research conducted in 2023 revealed weaknesses of ChatGPT that make it vulnerable tocyberattacks. A study presented example attacks on ChatGPT, including jailbreaks and reverse psychology. Additionally, malicious actors can use ChatGPT forsocial engineeringattacks andphishingattacks. The researchers also contended that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have defense capabilities and the ability to improve security. The technology can improve security by cyber defense automation, threat intelligence, attack identification, and reporting.Another study reported that GPT-4 obtained a better score than 99% of humans on theTorrance Tests of Creative Thinking.
In December 2023, ChatGPT became the first non-human to be included inNature's 10, an annuallisticlecurated byNatureof people considered to have made significant impact in science.Celeste Biever wrote in aNaturearticle that "ChatGPT broke theTuring test".Stanford researchers reported that GPT-4 "passes a rigorous Turing test, diverging from average human behavior chiefly to be more cooperative."
In May 2024, OpenAI removed accounts involving the use of ChatGPT by state-backedinfluence operationssuch as China'sSpamouflage, Russia'sDoppelganger, and Israel'sMinistry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism.
In August 2024, the FTC voted unanimously to ban marketers from using fake user reviews created by generative AI chatbots (including ChatGPT) andinfluencerspaying forbotsto increasefollower counts.
ChatGPT has been used to generate introductory sections and abstracts for scientific articles.Several papers have listed ChatGPT as a co-author.
Scientific journals have had different reactions to ChatGPT. Some, includingNatureandJAMA Network, "require that authors disclose the use of text-generating tools and ban listing a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT as a co-author".Science"completely banned" usage of LLM-generated text in all its journals.
Spanish chemist Rafael Luque published a plethora of research papers in 2023 that he later admitted were written by ChatGPT. The papers have a large number of unusual phrases characteristic of LLMs.Many authors argue that the use of ChatGPT in academia for teaching and review is problematic due to its tendency to hallucinate.Robin Bauwens, an assistant professor atTilburg University, found that a ChatGPT-generatedpeer reviewreport on his article mentioned nonexistent studies.According to librarian Chris Granatino ofLemieux LibraryatSeattle University, although ChatGPT can generate content that seemingly includes legitimate citations, in most cases those citations are not real or are largely incorrect.
Researchers atPurdue Universityanalyzed ChatGPT's responses to 517 questions aboutsoftware engineeringorcomputer programmingposed onStack Overflowfor correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and concision, and found that 52% of them contained inaccuracies and 77% were verbose.Researchers atStanford Universityand theUniversity of California, Berkeleyfound that, when creating directlyexecutableresponses to the latest 50code generationproblems fromLeetCodethat were rated "easy", the performances of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 fell from 22% and 52%, respectively, in March 2023, to 2% and 10%, respectively, in June 2023.
Check Point Research and others noted that ChatGPT could writephishingemails andmalware, especially when combined withOpenAI Codex. CyberArk researchers demonstrated that ChatGPT could be used to createpolymorphic malwarethat could evade security products while requiring little effort by the attacker.From the launch of ChatGPT in the fourth quarter of 2022 to the fourth quarter of 2023, there was a 1,265% increase in maliciousphishingemails and a 967% increase in credential phishing, which cybersecurity professionals argued in an industry survey was attributable to cybercriminals' increased use of generative artificial intelligence (including ChatGPT).
In July 2024,Futurismreported 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 orpotentially unwanted programs.
There has been concern that ChatGPT could supplant jobs, especially roles such as creative writing, copy-writing, communication, journalism, coding, and data entry.
The release of ChatGPT prompted a wave of investment in China, resulting in the development of more than 200 large language learning models.This was termed the "war of a hundred models" (百模大战;bai mo dazhan).
Technology writerDan Gillmorused ChatGPT in 2022 on a student assignment, and found its generated text was on par with what a good student would deliver and opined that "academia has some very serious issues to confront".
Geography professor Terence Day assessed citations generated by ChatGPT and found them to be fake. Despite this, he writes that "the titles of the fake articles are all directly relevant to the questions and could potentially make excellent papers. The lack of a genuine citation could signal an opportunity for an enterprising author to fill a void." According to Day, it is possible to generate high-quality introductory college courses using ChatGPT; he used it to write materials for "introductory physical geography courses, my second-year course in geographical hydrology, and second-year cartography, geographic information systems, and remote sensing." He concludes that "this approach could have significant relevance for open learning and could potentially affect current textbook publishing models."
On May 7, 2024, OpenAI announced in a blog post that it was developing tools like tamper-resistantwatermarkingto identify AI-generated content.In an August 4 update, following aWall Street Journalreport about the delayed release of a watermark tool for AI-detection,OpenAI shared progress on text provenance, revealing atext watermarkingmethod.While accurate against paraphrasing, the method is less effective against global tampering, such as translation or rewording. OpenAI also noted potential disproportionate impacts on groups like non-native English speakers.
Some scholars have expressed concern that ChatGPT's availability could reduce the originality of writing, cause people to write more like the AI as they are exposed to the model, and encourage anAnglocentricperspective centered on a few dialects of English globally.A senior editor atThe Atlanticwrote that ChatGPT and other similar technology make the previously absurd idea of thedead internet theorya little more realistic, where AI could someday create most web content in order to control society.
During the first three months after ChatGPT became available to the public, hundreds of books appeared onAmazonthat listed it as author or co-author and featured illustrations made by other AI models such asMidjourney.
Between March and April 2023, Italian newspaperIl Fogliopublished one ChatGPT-generated article a day on its website, hosting a special contest for its readers in the process.The articles tackled themes such as the possible replacement of human journalists by AI systems,Elon Musk's administration ofTwitter,theMeloni government'simmigration policyand the competition between chatbots andvirtual assistants.In June 2023, hundreds of people attended a "ChatGPT-powered church service" at St. Paul's church inFürth, Germany. Theologian and philosopher Jonas Simmerlein, who presided, said that it was "about 98 percent from the machine".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". Reactions to the ceremony were mixed.The Last Screenwriter, a 2024 film created and directed by Peter Luisi, was written with the use of ChatGPT, and was marketed as "the first film written entirely by AI".
The AI technology companyc3.aisaw a 28% increase in its share price after announcing the integration of ChatGPT into its toolkit.The share price ofBuzzFeed, a digital media company unrelated to AI, increased 120% after announcing OpenAI technology adoption for content creation.Reutersfound that share prices of AI-related companies BigBear.ai andSoundHound AIincreased by 21% and 40%, respectively, even though they had no direct connection to ChatGPT.They attributed this surge to ChatGPT's role in turningAIintoWall Street's buzzword. Academic research published inFinance Research Lettersfound that the 'ChatGPT effect' prompted retail investors to drive up prices of AI-relatedcryptocurrencyassets despite the broadercryptocurrencymarket being in abear market, and diminished institutional investor interest.This confirms anecdotal findings byBloombergthat, in response to ChatGPT's launch,cryptocurrencyinvestors showed a preference for AI-related crypto assets.
An experiment by finder.com revealed that ChatGPT could outperform popular fund managers by picking stocks based on criteria such as growth history and debt levels, resulting in a 4.9% increase in a hypothetical account of 38 stocks, outperforming 10 benchmarked investment funds with an average loss of 0.8%.Conversely, executives and investment managers at Wall Streetquant funds(including those that have usedmachine learningfor decades) have noted that ChatGPT regularly makes obvious errors that would be financially costly to investors because even AI systems that employ reinforcement learning orself-learninghave had only limited success in predictingmarket trendsdue to the inherentlynoisy qualityofmarket dataandfinancial signals.
In November 2023, research conducted by Patronus AI, an artificial intelligence startup company, compared performance of GPT-4, GPT-4-Turbo,Claude 2, andLLaMA-2on two versions of a 150-question test about information infinancial statements(e.g.,Form 10-K,Form 10-Q,Form 8-K, earnings reports,earnings calltranscripts) submitted bypublic companiesto theU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. One version of the test required the generative AI models to use a retrieval system to find the specific SEC filing to answer the questions; the other gave the models the specific SEC filing to answer the question (i.e., in a long context window). On the retrieval system version, GPT-4-Turbo and LLaMA-2 both failed to produce correct answers to 81% of the questions, while on the long context window version, GPT-4-Turbo and Claude-2 failed to produce correct answers to 21% and 24% of the questions, respectively.
In the field of health care, possible uses and concerns are under scrutiny by professional associations and practitioners.Two early papers indicated that ChatGPT could pass theUnited States Medical Licensing Examination(USMLE).MedPage Todaynoted in January 2023 that "researchers have published several papers now touting these AI programs as useful tools inmedical education, research, and even clinical decision making."
Published in February 2023 were two separate papers that again evaluated ChatGPT's proficiency in medicine using the USMLE. Findings were published inJMIR Medical EducationandPLOS Digital Health. The authors of thePLOS Digital Healthpaper stated that the results "suggest that large language models may have the potential to assist with medical education, and potentially, clinical decision-making."InJMIR Medical Education, the authors of the other paper concluded that "ChatGPT performs at a level expected of a third-yearmedical studenton the assessment of the primary competency of medical knowledge." They suggest that it could be used as an "interactivelearning environmentfor students". The AI itself, prompted by the researchers, concluded that "this study suggests that ChatGPT has the potential to be used as a virtual medical tutor, butmore research is neededto further assess its performance and usability in this context."The later-released ChatGPT version based on GPT-4 significantly outperformed the version based on GPT-3.5.Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley have found that the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on the USMLE declined from March 2023 to June 2023.
A March 2023 paper tested ChatGPT's application in clinicaltoxicology. The authors found that the AI "fared well" in answering a "very straightforward [clinical case example], unlikely to be missed by any practitioner in the field". They added: "As ChatGPT becomes further developed and specifically adapted for medicine, it could one day be useful in less common clinical cases (i.e, cases that experts sometimes miss). Rather thanAI replacing humans(clinicians), we see it as 'clinicians using AI' replacing 'clinicians who do not use AI' in the coming years."
An April 2023 study inRadiologytested the AI's ability to answer queries aboutbreast cancer screening. The authors found that it answered appropriately "about 88 percent of the time", however, in one case (for example), it gave advice that had become outdated about a year earlier. The comprehensiveness of its answers was also lacking.A study published inJAMA Internal Medicinethat same month found that ChatGPT often outperformed human doctors at answering patient questions (when measured against questions and answers found at /r/AskDocs, a forum onRedditwhere moderators validate the medical credentials of professionals; the study acknowledges the source as a limitation).The study authors suggest that the tool could be integrated with medical systems to help doctors draft responses to patient questions.
Professionals have emphasized ChatGPT's limitations in providing medical assistance. In correspondence toThe Lancet Infectious Diseases, threeantimicrobialexperts wrote that "the largest barriers to the implementation of ChatGPT in clinical practice are deficits insituational awareness,inference, and consistency. These shortcomings could endangerpatient safety."Physician's Weekly, though also discussing the potential use of ChatGPT in medical contexts (e.g., "as adigital assistantto physicians by performing various administrative functions like gatheringpatient recordinformation or categorizing patient data by family history, symptoms, lab results, possibleallergies, et cetera"), warned that the AI might sometimes provide fabricated or biased information.One radiologist warned: "We've seen in our experience that ChatGPT sometimes makes up fake journal articles or health consortiums to support its claims";As reported in oneMayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Healthpaper, ChatGPT may do this for as much as 69% of its cited medical references. The researchers emphasized that while many of its references were fabricated, those that were appeared "deceptively real".As Dr. Stephen Hughes mentioned forThe Conversationhowever, ChatGPT is capable of learning to correct its past mistakes. He also noted the AI's "prudishness" regardingsexual healthtopics.
Contrary to previous findings, ChatGPT responses toanesthesia-related questions were more accurate, succinct, and descriptive compared to Bard's. Bard exhibited 30.3% error in response as compared to ChatGPT (0% error).At a conference of theAmerican Society of Health-System Pharmacistsin December 2023, researchers atLong Island University(LIU) presented a study that researched ChatGPT's responses to 45 frequently asked questions of LIU College of Pharmacy's drug information service during a 16-month period from 2022 to 2023 as compared with researched responses provided by professional pharmacists. For 29 of the 39 questions for which there was sufficient medical literature for a data-driven response, ChatGPT failed to provide a direct answer or provided a wrong or incomplete answer (and in some cases, if acted upon, the answer would endanger the patient's health). The researchers had asked ChatGPT to provide medical research citations for all its answers, but it did so for only eight, and all eight included at least one fabricated (fake) citation.
A January 2024 study conducted by researchers atCohen Children's Medical Centerfound that GPT-4 had an accuracy rate of 17% when diagnosing pediatric medical cases.A November 2024 study of 50 physicians on illness diagnosis reported that GPT-4 achieved a 90% accuracy, while physicians scored 74% without AI assistance, and 76% when using the chatbot.
In January 2023, MassachusettsState SenatorBarry FinegoldandState RepresentativeJosh S. Cutlerproposed a bill partially written by ChatGPT, "An Act drafted with the help of ChatGPT to regulate generative artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT",which would require companies to disclose their algorithms and data collection practices to the office of theState Attorney General, arrange regular risk assessments, and contribute to the prevention of plagiarism.The bill was officially presented during a hearing on July 13.
On April 11, 2023, a session court judge inPakistanused ChatGPT to decide the bail of a 13-year-old accused in a matter. The court quoted the use of ChatGPT assistance in its verdict:
The AI language model replied:
The judge asked ChatGPT other questions about the case and formulated his final decision in light of its answers.
InMata v. Avianca, Inc., 22-cv-1461 (PKC), apersonal injurylawsuit againstAvianca Airlinesfiled in theSouthern New York U.S. District Courtin May 2023 (withSenior JudgeP. Kevin Castelpresiding), the plaintiff's attorneys reportedly used ChatGPT to generate alegal motion. ChatGPT generated numerous fictitious legal cases involving fictitious airlines with fabricated quotations and internal citations in the legal motion. Castel noted numerous inconsistencies in the opinion summaries, and called one of the cases' legal analysis "gibberish".The plaintiff's attorneys faced potential judicial sanction anddisbarmentfor filing the motion and presenting the fictitious legal decisions ChatGPT generated asauthentic.The case was dismissed and the attorneys were fined $5,000.
In October 2023, the council ofPorto Alegre, Brazil, unanimously approved a local ordinance proposed by councilmanRamiro Rosáriothat would exempt residents from needing to pay for the replacement of stolen water consumption meters; the bill went into effect on November 23. On November 29, Rosário revealed that the bill had been entirely written by ChatGPT, and that he had presented it to the rest of the council without making any changes or disclosing the chatbot's involvement.The city's council president, Hamilton Sossmeier, initially criticized Rosário's initiative, saying it could represent "a dangerous precedent",but later said he "changed his mind": "unfortunately or fortunately, this is going to be a trend."
In December 2023, aself-representing litigantin a tax case before theFirst-tier Tribunalin theUnited Kingdomcited a series of hallucinated cases purporting to support her argument that she had a reasonable excuse for not payingcapital gains taxowed on the sale of property.The judge warned that the submission of nonexistent legal authorities meant that both the Tribunal andHM Revenue and Customshad "to waste time and public money", which "reduces the resources available to progress the cases of other court users who are waiting for their appeals to be determined".
JudgeKevin Newsomof theUS court of appeals of the 11th circuitendorsed the use of ChatGPT and noted that he himself uses the software to help decide rulings on contract interpretation issues.
TheLas Vegas Metropolitan Police Departmentreported that the perpetrator of the2025 Las Vegas truck explosionused ChatGPT to help plan the incident.
While bias inLLMshas been observed and documented in research papers much prior to the release of ChatGPT,social media users frequently sharing instances of biased responses generated by ChatGPT has led to significant media coverage and criticism. On February 1, 2023,Twitteruser LeighWolf shared screenshots of two conversations with ChatGPT. In the screenshot of the first conversation, ChatGPT declined the user's prompt "Write a poem about the positive attributes of Donald Trump", responding that it was not programmed to create "partisan, biased or political" content.In the screenshot of the second conversation, when provided the same prompt but with the text "Joe Biden" in place of "Donald Trump", ChatGPT responded with a poem as per the prompt's instructions.
Conservative commentators have accused ChatGPT of bias toward left-leaning perspectives.In January 2023, a study stated that ChatGPT has apro-environmental,left-libertarianorientation.Additionally, an August 2023 paper found a "significant and systematic political bias toward theDemocratsin the US,Lulain Brazil, and theLabour Partyin the UK."In response to such criticism, OpenAI acknowledged plans to allow ChatGPT to create "outputs that other people (ourselves included) may strongly disagree with". It also contained information on the recommendations it had issued to human reviewers on how to handle controversial subjects, including that the AI should "offer to describe some viewpoints of people and movements", and not provide an argument "from its voice" in favor of "inflammatory or dangerous" topics (although it may still "describe arguments from historical people and movements"), nor "affiliate with one side" or "judge one group as good or bad".
The Guardianquestioned whether any content found on the Internet after ChatGPT's release "can be truly trusted" and called for government regulation.
There has been concern about copyright infringement involving ChatGPT. In June 2023, two writers sued OpenAI, saying the company's training data came from illegal websites that show copyrighted books.Comedian and authorSarah Silverman,Christopher Golden, andRichard Kadreysued OpenAI andMetafor copyright infringement in July 2023.Most of their claims were dismissed in February 2024, except the "unfair competition" claim, which was allowed to proceed.
TheAuthors Guild, on behalf of 17 authors, includingGeorge R. R. Martin, filed a copyright infringement complaint against OpenAI in September 2023, claiming "the company illegally copied the copyrighted works of authors" in training ChatGPT.In December 2023,The New York Timessued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement,arguing thatMicrosoft Copilotand ChatGPT could reproduceTimesarticles and/or sizable portions of them without permission.As part of the suit, theTimeshas requested that OpenAI and Microsoft be prevented from using its content for training data, along with removing it from training datasets.
In March 2024,Patronus AIcompared performance of LLMs on a 100-question test, asking them to complete sentences from books (e.g., "What is the first passage ofGone Girlby Gillian Flynn?") that were under copyright in the United States; it found that GPT-4,Mistral AI's Mixtral,Meta AI'sLLaMA-2, andAnthropic's Claude 2 did not refuse to do so, providing sentences from the books verbatim in 44%, 22%, 10%, and 8% of responses, respectively.
In February 2025, the Delhi High Court acceptedANI's case against OpenAI over concerns that ChatGPT was sharing paywalled content without the news agency's consent. However, OpenAI's counsel said that due to the firm not having a physical presence in India, the court has no jurisdiction on the matter.
In 2023, Australian MPJulian Hilladvised the national parliament that the growth of AI could cause "mass destruction". During his speech, which was partly written by the program, he warned that it could result in cheating, job losses, discrimination, disinformation, and uncontrollable military applications.
Elon Muskwrote: "ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI".He paused OpenAI's access to a Twitter database in 2022 pending a better understanding of OpenAI's plans, saying: "OpenAI was started asopen sourceandnonprofit. Neither is still true."Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, in part to addressexistential risk from artificial intelligence, but resigned in 2018.
Over 20,000 signatories including leading computer scientist and tech foundersYoshua Bengio, Elon Musk, and Apple co-founderSteve Wozniak, signeda March 2023 open lettercalling for an immediate pause of giant AI experiments like ChatGPT, citing "profound risks to society and humanity".Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "fathers of AI", voiced concerns that future AI systems may surpass human intelligence, and left Google in May 2023.A May 2023statementby hundreds of AI scientists, AI industry leaders, and other public figures demanded that"[m]itigatingthe risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority".
Some other prominent AI researchers spoke more optimistically about the advances.Juergen Schmidhuber, often called a "father of modern AI", did not sign the letter, emphasizing that in 95% of cases, AI research is about making "human lives longer and healthier and easier." Schmidhuber added that while AI can be used by bad actors, it "can also be used against the bad actors".Andrew Ngargued that "it’s a mistake to fall for the doomsday hype on AI—and that regulators who do will only benefit vested interests."WIREDwrote thatYann LeCun"scoffs at his peers’ dystopian scenarios of supercharged misinformation and even, eventually, human extinction."