The owner of GPT4free, a free GPT4 AI chatbot, may be facing legal troubles as OpenAI threatens to take him to court. Why?Because his chatbot can use ChatGPT4 (opens in new tab) without paying for it.
GPT4free bypasses ChatGPT4’s $20/month paywall (opens in new tab) By getting a query from a site that uses API of ChatGPT4 (opens in new tab), Quora and You.com. Piggyback answers from sites that pay to use API licenses.
Developer Xtekky said: tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) That OpenAI sent him a letter demanding that he withdraw the Github project within five days or take legal responsibility. However, the developer does not consider himself responsible for what others do with his scripts in his GitHub repository. Additionally, he said OpenAI shouldn’t be chasing him because he doesn’t directly connect to his API in ChatGPT4. His script just queries sites that do that, and OpenAI should contact those sites instead of targeting him.
“OpenAI can contact the site to warn/notify and work together to come to me and take it down, but this seems to only come from OpenAI and is basically attacked directly by me claims to be,” said Xtekky.
As Tom’s Hardware points out, sites that pay for OpenAI’s API license every time you run a query on GPT4free are basically doing their work for free, and potentially advertising by visiting the site. I am missing out on income.
“You can do the same thing by just opening a tab on the site. You can open tabs like Phind or You in your browser or spam requests,” said Xtekky. “My repo just does it the easier way.” He says he removed the scripts that used the sites phind.com, ora.sh, and writesonic.com as requested.
“I believe in them [OpenAI] “They have contacted me before to pressure me to remove the repo myself,” Xtekky said.
Xtekky also said that the deletion of the Github repository was “not important” because his code has already spread around the internet. He plans to move his chatbot to a different domain and rebrand it to ‘gf4’. His Github on GPT4free is up and running for now.