In September 2025, following the suicide of a 16-year-old, OpenAI said it planned to add restrictions for users under 18, including the blocking of graphic sexual content and the prevention of flirtatious talk. In August 2024, OpenAI announced it had created a text watermarking method but did not release it for public use, saying that users would go to a competitor without watermarking if it publicly released its watermarking tool. ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. The ChatGPT-generated avatar told the people, “Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany”. In an industry survey, cybersecurity professionals argued that it was attributable to cybercriminals’ increased use of generative artificial intelligence (including ChatGPT).
Age restrictions
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.
The company announced a slew of generative AI-powered features to counter OpenAI and Microsoft. 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.
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.
Mental health
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. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that users were unable to see the contents of the conversations. In October 2025, OpenAI reported that approximately 0.15% of ChatGPT’s active users in a given week have conversations including explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent, translating to more than a million people weekly. In March 2023, ChatGPT Plus users got access to third-party plugins and a browsing mode (with Internet access). 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.
- One study analyzed ChatGPT’s responses to 517 questions about software engineering or computer programming posed on Stack Overflow for correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and concision.
- ChatGPT gained one million users in five days and 100 million in two months, becoming the fastest-growing internet application in history.
- In July 2025, OpenAI released ChatGPT agent, an AI agent that can perform multi-step tasks.
- ChatGPT is programmed to reject prompts that may violate its content policy.
Financial markets
Despite this, users may “jailbreak” ChatGPT with prompt engineering techniques to bypass these restrictions. … It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations”, or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. In one instance, ChatGPT generated a rap in which women and scientists of color were asserted to be inferior to white male scientists.
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. 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.
The reward model of ChatGPT, designed around human oversight, can be over-optimized and thus hinder performance, in an example of an optimization pathology known as Goodhart’s law. 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. It was capable of autonomously performing tasks through web browser interactions, including filling forms, placing online orders, scheduling appointments, and other browser-based tasks.
GPT-4
- It can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers known as hallucinations.
- 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.
- Andrew Ng argued that “it’s a mistake to fall for the doomsday hype on AI—and that regulators who do will only benefit vested interests.” Yann LeCun dismissed doomsday warnings of AI-powered misinformation and existential threats to the human race.
- In March 2023, ChatGPT Plus users got access to third-party plugins and a browsing mode (with Internet access).
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.
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.
Features
Users can upvote or downvote responses they receive from ChatGPT and fill in a text field with additional feedback. The laborers were exposed to toxic and traumatic content; one worker described the assignment as “torture”. To build a safety system against harmful content (e.g., sexual abuse, violence, racism, sexism), OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning around $1.32 to $2 per hour to label such content. In the case of supervised learning, the trainers acted as both the user and the AI assistant. The fine-tuning process involved supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
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.
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). These include, among many others, writing and debugging computer programs, composing music, scripts, fairy tales, and essays, answering questions (sometimes at a level exceeding that of an average human test-taker), and generating business concepts. ChatGPT’s training data includes software manual pages, information about internet phenomena such as bulletin board systems, multiple programming languages, and the text of Wikipedia.
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.
GPT-4
As before, OpenAI has not disclosed technical details such as the exact number of parameters or the composition of its training dataset. According to OpenAI, it features reduced hallucinations and enhanced pattern recognition, creativity, and user interaction. Released in February 2025, GPT-4.5 was described by Altman as a “giant, expensive model”. In September 2024, OpenAI introduced o1-preview and a faster, vegas casino cheaper model named o1-mini.