‘ChatGPT’ App At Top Of App Store Charts Is A Dodgy Clone That Asks For Money

By now, you’ve likely heard of ChatGPT, the popular new kid on the artificially-intelligent block. ChatGPT is to text what DALL-E is to art. You feed it a prompt and it spins out a full body of text—be it an essay, article, or email—according to your request.

What’s important to note is that ChatGPT is also free and welcomes unlimited prompts, making it a very attractive tool for students and researchers, for better or for worse. Though that hasn’t stopped some from exploiting its open-source, publically-available resources to reel in some moolah, and unwitting users from taking a bite.

As spotted by MacRumors, a new app called ‘ChatGPT Chat GPT AI With GPT-3’ has skyrocketed to the second spot on Apple’s App Store charts for productivity apps in the US, indicating that it has been installed by thousands of users. These people might come to regret their decision later, as the app demands a US$7.99 weekly subscription, or an annual fee of US$49.99, for a service that’s originally free to use.

The app, listed by a developer by the name of “Social Media Apps & Game Sports health Run Hiking Runing [sic] fitness tracking,” is a gateway to the ChatGPT platform and charges users to create unlimited results as well as remove in-app advertisements. If you go to the ChatGPT website, you’ll find that these “perks” are built-in.

It also attempts to pass off as an official or endorsed service by using an icon pretty much identical to the logo of ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

There is truly no value to downloading the copycat chatbot as users have complained of it generating irrelevant results with their limited queries. Productivity app? More like counterproductivity app.

The iOS App Store is full of folks putting ChatGPT into a paid wrapper with ambiguous language that would let you believe you’re paying for ChatGPT pic.twitter.com/3w0rK14E5I

— Austen Allred (@Austen) January 7, 2023

Another sketchy fact, as pointed out by Lifehacker, is that this app is over four years old. The prototype version of ChatGPT only launched on November 30, 2022, which means ‘ChatGPT Chat GPT AI With GPT-3’ previously had different features.

While the app has a 4.5-star rating on the App Store, when you filter reviews to the latest first, you’ll be shown comments condemning the “fake app” at the top.

“Answers given are not complete,” says one user. “OpenAI is free. This one charges a subscription,” warns another.

“I clicked ‘continue free’, and it asked to pay. Well, it is not [an app from] OpenAI. It just wants to trick you to pay for a high subscription price,” reads another review.

As of the time of writing, the app is still alive on the Apple App Store, somehow circumventing its review process. Meanwhile, it’s been taken down from the Google Play Store.

If you’re looking for a more productive way to integrate ChatGPT into your daily life, there are programs that build upon its API that allow you to do so. Among them is ChatGPT for Google, a Chrome extension that inserts ChatGPT responses into results pages on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. Need we mention that many of these programs are also free?

[via MacRumors and Lifehacker, images via various sources]