OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company, may be taking legal action against the developer of a free GPT4 chatbot for using their technology without paying for it. The chatbot in question, GPT4free, provides users with answers from sites that pay for an API license from OpenAI, like Qnet, You.com, and Phind.com, without the user paying for it.
Developer Xtekky has been given a five day deadline by OpenAI to shut down his Github project, or face potential legal consequences. Xtekky believes he is not liable for what his users do with the code from his Github repository, as they are not connecting their bot directly to ChatGPT4’s API.
Despite removing scripts that used the sites phind.com, ora.sh, and writingsonic.com, Xtekky believes OpenAI should not be targeting him, as the query for the answers is coming from the sites, not his script.
The idea of GPT4free is that it allows the user to skip paying the ChatGPT4’s fee of $20 a month and use the chatbot for free. As Tom’s Hardware points out, any queries made through GPT4free are essentially cutting into ad revenue that the sites who use OpenAI’s API could potentially be making.
To stay online, Xtekky plans to move his Chatbot GPT4free to a different domain and rebrand it as “gf4” to avoid legal repercussions. The official Github project is still live, however Xtekky believes deleting his repository will be “insignificant” since the code and idea already spread across the internet.
OpenAI is a research laboratory focusing on developing friendly AI, composed of machine learning and natural language processing, through hardware and software systems. Founded in late 2015 and initially funded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, OpenAI has collaborated with many researchers and organizations on a variety of topics. Their mission is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.
Xtekky is a software developer from Poland, he graduated from the University of Zielona Góra in 2016 with a master’s degree in Computer Science. Since then, he has worked in various software engineering roles, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He is currently working on developing advanced chatbots that use GPT4 free as a base.
