This has led to concern over the rise of what has come to be called “synthetic media” and “AI slop” which are generated by AI and rapidly spread over social media and the internet. 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. The chatbot technology can improve security by cyber defense automation, threat intelligence, attack identification, and reporting. 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.
Features
In September 2024, OpenAI introduced o1-preview and a faster, cheaper model named o1-mini. In November 2023, OpenAI launched GPT-4 Turbo with a 128,000 token context window. A study presented example attacks on ChatGPT, including jailbreaks and reverse psychology. ChatGPT is programmed to reject prompts that may violate its content policy.
Premium users were originally limited in the number of messages they could send to the new model, but OpenAI increased and eventually removed these limits. GPT-4, which was released on March 14, 2023, was made available via API and for premium ChatGPT users. The model can also generate new images based on existing ones provided in the prompt, which can, for example, be used to transform images with specific styles or inpaint areas. 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.
GPT-4.5
In an industry survey, cybersecurity professionals argued that it was attributable to cybercriminals’ increased use of generative artificial intelligence (including ChatGPT). In January 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning banned any undocumented use of ChatGPT or other large language models to generate any text in submitted papers. As of July 2025, Science expects authors to release in full how AI-generated content is used and made in their work. As of 2023, there were several pending U.S. lawsuits challenging the use of copyrighted data to train AI models, with defendants arguing that this falls under fair use.
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. A shadow market has emerged for users to get access to foreign software tools. GPT-5 was launched on August 7, 2025, and is publicly accessible through ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and via OpenAI’s API.
- These limitations may be revealed when ChatGPT responds to prompts including descriptors of people.
- In January 2023, Science “completely banned” LLM-generated text in all its journals; however, this policy was just to give the community time to decide what acceptable use looks like.
- ChatGPT is frequently used for translation and summarization tasks, and can simulate interactive environments such as a Linux terminal, a multi-user chat room, or simple text-based games such as tic-tac-toe.
- In March 2023, a bug allowed some users to see the titles of other users’ conversations.
ChatGPT (based on GPT-4) was better able to translate Japanese to English when compared to Bing, Bard, and DeepL Translator 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. On August 19, 2025, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Go in India, a low-cost subscription plan priced at ₹399 per month, offering ten times higher message, image generation, and file-upload limits, double the memory span compared to the free version, and support for UPI payments. In October 2023, OpenAI’s image generation model DALL-E 3 was integrated into ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise. According to the company, the paid version of the website was still experimental, but provided access during peak periods, no downtime, priority access to new features, and faster response speeds. In February 2023, OpenAI launched a premium service, ChatGPT Plus, that costs US$20 per month.
- Chris Granatino, a librarian at Seattle University, noted that while ChatGPT can generate content that seemingly includes legitimate citations, in most cases those citations are not real or largely incorrect.
- A shadow market has emerged for users to get access to foreign software tools.
- ChatGPT gained one million users in five days and 100 million in two months, becoming the fastest-growing internet application in history.
- TrendForce market intelligence estimated that 30,000 Nvidia GPUs (each costing approximately $10,000–15,000) were used to power ChatGPT in 2023.
- 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.
Mental health
In the 2020s, the rapid advancement of deep learning-based generative artificial intelligence models raised questions about the copyright status of AI-generated works, and about whether copyright infringement occurs when such are trained or used. Over many iterations of ChatGPT, plus users maintained more access to better models than the free tier provided, and access to additional features like voice mode. In the reinforcement learning stage, human trainers first ranked responses generated by the model in previous conversations. Despite decades of using AI, Wall Street professionals report that consistently beating the market with AI, including recent large language models, is challenging due to limited and noisy financial data. In August 2024, the FTC voted unanimously to ban marketers from using fake user reviews created by generative AI chatbots (including ChatGPT) and influencers paying for bots to increase follower counts.
ChatGPT was initially free to the public, and OpenAI planned to monetize the service later. In October 2025, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, a browser integrating the ChatGPT assistant directly into web navigation, to compete with existing browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari. In March 2025, OpenAI updated ChatGPT to generate images using GPT-4o instead of DALL-E. It allows ChatGPT to search the web in an attempt to make more accurate and up-to-date responses. 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).
Many companies adopted ChatGPT and similar chatbot technologies into their product offers. The dangers are that “meaningless content and writing thereby becomes part of our culture, particularly on social media, which we nonetheless try to understand or fit into our existing cultural horizon.” The Guardian questioned whether any content found on the Internet after ChatGPT’s release “can be truly trusted” and called for government regulation.
Computer security
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’s General Data Protection Regulation. ChatGPT also provided an outline of how human reviewers are trained to reduce inappropriate content and to attempt to provide political information without affiliating with any political position. ChatGPT gained one million users in five days and 100 million in two months, becoming the fastest-growing internet application in history. 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. GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a multilingual, multimodal generative pre-trained transformer developed by OpenAI and released in May 2024.
Agents
ChatGPT can find more up-to-date information by searching the web, but this doesn’t ensure that responses are accurate, as it may access unreliable or misleading websites. A 2025 Sentio University survey of 499 LLM users with self-reported mental health conditions found that 96.2% use ChatGPT, with 48.7% using it specifically for mental health support or therapy-related purposes. At launch, the feature was limited to purchases on Etsy from US users with a payment method linked to their OpenAI account.
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. 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 a credit card number, and credit card expiration date”. Shortly after the bug was fixed, users could not see their conversation history. In March 2023, a bug allowed some users to see the titles of other users’ conversations. One such workaround, popularized on Reddit in early 2023, involved 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 the content policy. Despite this, users may “jailbreak” ChatGPT with prompt engineering techniques to bypass these restrictions.
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). In July 2024, the American Bar Association (ABA) issued its first formal ethics opinion on attorneys using generative AI. 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. In Mata v. Avianca, Inc., a personal injury lawsuit filed in May 2023, the plaintiff’s attorneys used ChatGPT to generate a legal motion. The uses and potential of ChatGPT in health care has been the topic of scientific publications and experts have shared many opinions.
Google’s Bard (now Gemini) launched on February 6, 2023, one day before Microsoft’s announcement of Bing Chat (now Microsoft Copilot). Their leaders emphasized their earlier caution regarding public deployment was due to the trust the public places in Google Search. Kelsey Piper of Vox wrote that “ChatGPT is the general public’s first hands-on introduction to how powerful modern AI has gotten” and that ChatGPT is “smart enough to be useful despite its flaws”. Like GPT-5, it comes with a “Thinking” mode for complex problem-solving and an “Instant” mode for fast responses.
OpenAI’s outsourcing partner was Sama, a training-data company based in San Francisco, California. These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future. These rankings were used to create “reward models” that were used to fine-tune the model further by using several iterations of proximal policy optimization. The ethics of its development, particularly the use of copyrighted content as training data, have also drawn controversy. The chatbot can facilitate academic dishonesty, generate misinformation, and create malicious code. As of 2025, ChatGPT’s website is among the top 5 most-visited websites globally, and has over 800 million active weekly users.
The Pro launch coincided with the release of the o1 model, providing unlimited access to o1 and advanced voice mode. In September 2025, OpenAI added a feature called Pulse, which generates a daily analysis of a user’s chats and connected apps such as Gmail and Google Calendar. ChatGPT is frequently used for translation and summarization tasks, and can simulate interactive environments such as a Linux terminal, a multi-user chat room, or simple text-based games such as tic-tac-toe. 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.
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “fathers of AI”, voiced concerns that future AI systems may surpass human intelligence. Over 20,000 signatories including Yoshua Bengio, Elon Musk, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, signed a March 2023 open letter calling for an immediate pause of giant AI experiments like ChatGPT, citing “profound risks to society and humanity”. 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.