ChatGPT has created quite a buzz among online communities, but threat actors too seem to be making the most of the obsession around the chatbot. A fake ChatGPT app has emerged on the Apple App Store — pretending to be ChatGPT while deploying a paid subscription to the free version of the chatbot.
The alleged fake ChatGPT app is charging users as much as $7.99 for weekly subscriptions to a service that already exists for free.
The makers behind the alleged fake ChatGPT app, “Social Media Apps & Game Sports health Run Hiking Running fitness tracking,” are also running other apps on the App Store that are equally shady and emit a malicious campaign, wrote MacRumors editor Sami Fathi.
While it is not new that threat actors mimic websites and apps to lure victims into revealing their data, imitating ChatGPT could be tricky as it is an AI-driven app sophisticated enough to provide accurate answers to queries, among doing other multiple tasks as instructed.
What does ChatGPT do
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a conversational language model introduced in 2018 and was launched in November 2022.
Utilizing the formidable GPT-3 architecture as a foundation, this generative pre-trained transformer has been fine-tuned utilizing a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning techniques for an unparalleled user experience.
ChatGPT is trained to generate text in a conversational style and can be fine-tuned for a variety of language generation tasks such as dialogue systems, chatbots, and text completion. It can be used to generate human-like responses to prompts.
The model is pre-trained on a large dataset of conversational text, so it has a good understanding of how human conversations work, which makes it well-suited for building conversational AI systems.
ChatGPT is freely accessible to those with an OpenAI account, however, its popularity has attracted unscrupulous individuals looking to profit off its name.
One such example is the app “ChatGPT Chat GPT AI With GPT-3,” which gives the appearance of being the official ChatGPT app, however, it has no association with OpenAI and appears to be completely independent from the actual bot.
Fake ChatGPT app reigns over Apple Store
The application, which claims to be associated with ChatGPT, is charging exorbitant subscription fees of $7.99 per week or $49.99 per year for what it claims to be an ad-free experience and unrestricted access to the bot.
However, many users have found that the responses provided by the bot in this app are frequently generic and irrelevant, leading to dissatisfaction with the service.
Despite its questionable origins, the app in question has managed to rise in popularity and is currently sitting at the second spot for the most popular productivity app on the App Store in the United States.
With a large number of reviews, a significant proportion of them negative, it appears that many users are unhappy with the service and feel misled.
In particular, many have pointed out that the app is falsely claiming association with OpenAI and have expressed frustration that it seems to have successfully passed multiple rounds of review by the Apple App Store despite its suspicious behavior and presence.