Anyone can now use ChatGPT even without an OpenAI account. You still need an account for DALL-E 3, though.
OpenAI will no longer require an account to use ChatGPT, the company’s free AI platform. However, this only applies to ChatGPT, as other OpenAI products, like DALL-E 3, cost money to access and will still require an account for access. “We’re rolling this out gradually, with the aim to make AI accessible to anyone curious about its capabilities,” OpenAI said in a blog post.
Ever since ChatGPT first rolled out at the end of 2022, interested users have had to sign up for an OpenAI account. The chatbot proved popular and made ChatGPT one of the fastest-growing services ever. The company then added paid subscriptions to access products like DALL-E 3 and more advanced models. Users will need an account to save and review chat history, share chats, and have voiced conversations.
OpenAI has said more than 100 million people across 185 countries use ChatGPT weekly. Traffic tracker SimilarWeb found ChatGPT, with an estimated 1.6 billion visitors in February, remains the most visited AI chatbot site even though Google’s Gemini has begun to gain momentum. However, its traffic has dipped slightly from the highs reached in May 2023 when the number of estimated visits topped 1.8 billion.
OpenAI said it introduced “additional content safeguards for this experience,” including blocking prompts in a wider range of categories, but did not expound more on what these categories are. The option to opt out of model training will still be available, even to those without accounts. ChatGPT users can toggle if their ChatGPT activity can be used to train OpenAI’s AI models.
Meanwhile, other OpenAI products, like the newly announced AI voice cloning service Voice Engine and the video creation platform Sora, remain available only to a limited number set of users and partners and are not part of the perks of having an OpenAI account.
