First Impressions of the Official ChatGPT App
How OpenAI is fighting the copycats
Normally when I scroll to the Productivity section of the App Store, the apps are pretty stale.
Google’s Gmail is always hanging on the mantle. One or two note taking apps are creeping up in the rankings. Nothing to write home about. Afterall, there are only so many ways to be productive on an iPhone.
Today I checked Productivity and it looked a little different. The pesky note-writing apps are nowhere to be seen. Evernote’s now barely a footnote. The only app I recognized from before is Gmail, but it’s no longer #1. That honor goes to a new app in town. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its name is ChatGPT.
OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT released their app on May 18th (four days before this article was written), though it isn’t yet available to Android users or outside the US.
Just looking at the App Store rankings, I’m guessing the app’s launch came partially in response to the knock-off ChatGPT apps, such as Chat with Ask Ai, AI Chatbot Open Chat AI, and ChatOn — AI Chat Bot Assistant, that claim to be powered by ChatGPT. Though these claims are correct, these chatbot knockoffs aren’t produced by OpenAI. Instead they pay to use ChatGPT and pass this cost onto their users, which compromises OpenAI’s intent to keep the base version of ChatGPT free.
OpenAI doesn’t want copycats profiting off of its crown jewel, and their release of an official ChatGPT app speaks to that.
I doubt OpenAI appreciates these knock-offs butchering their name and brand either. AI Chatbot Open Chat AI could win an award for best knock-off name since Pizza Huh.
The app’s icon didn’t look particularly eye-grabbing on my screen, maybe because the ChatGPT logo vaguely resembles the Terminator’s eye (hopefully more coincidence than foreshadow).
Upon clicking the icon, the ChatGPT prompted me to login with either Apple, Google, or email, similar to the ChatGPT website. In the upper half of the screen, inspirational mantras flickered. “Let’s go” and “Let’s collaborate”, were some of the more notable ones. The typing of the mantras synchronized with a gentle thumping reverb from my iPhone. The ChatGPT app felt alive, and ready to respond.
The instant I logged in, I got hit with a pop-up:
I pressed Continue.
The pop-up disappeared, collapsing into a small black circle in the middle of the screen. On the bottom, I noticed a prompt to input messages.
I asked ChatGPT the usual questions.
“What’s the meaning of life”
“Are you sentient?”
“Why is your company’s logo a replica of the Terminator’s Eye?”
It answered the questions the same as the browser version with politeness and willingness to please. The app felt familiar if somewhat underwhelming, though I did like how the phone hummed with a gentle reverb as ChatGPT answered the questions.
Beyond that reassuring hum, the app seemed almost indistinguishable from searching ChatGPT on the iPhone browser, Safari.
The primary purpose of the app, I suspect further after using it, is to weaken the copycats that I mentioned earlier. By releasing their own, official version of ChatGPT, OpenAI cuts off the copycat’s air supply, as users will, almost certainly, switch to the official app (once they know about it).
The copycat chatbot apps are definitely on OpenAI’s radar.
In December the tech company applied in December to trademark “GPT” (GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”). As of April, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) refused to speed up the trademarking process.
The timing of this app’s release (only a month after the USPTO’s rejection) and the app’s barebone user interface seems indicative that OpenAI rushed to launch this app and squash the knock-offs.
In many ways, I don’t think ChatGPT, in its current form, is well-suited as an app. Despite the name “ChatGPT”, I imagine the majority of users type long prompts into ChatGPT, asking the chatbot to analyze paragraphs and dissect their own work. ChatGPT’s responses, which can also be quite long, are awkward to scroll through on an iPhone. They are also cumbersome to copy and paste without keyboard shortcuts.
In the long run the ChatGPT app may serve other functions for OpenAI. At the very least, it will provide the tech company with training data on how people type via phone, which is likely more error prone and short-handed. OpenAI can in turn adjust their language model to understand prompts from phones better.
The app will also keep ChatGPT top-of-mind, as users will see the ChatGPT logo every time they scroll on their phone. That sort of free branding rarely hurts….even if the logo is a homage to the Terminator.
Some Final Thoughts
If you’re reading this article, your world is likely going to be disrupted by AI.
We don’t know what the changes will be, but they’re certainly coming.
There’s a chance we all become human can-openers for robot overlords, collecting dust in a cupboard soon. There’s also a chance that AI unleashes ridiculous, ungodly levels of human talent, and we make the Renaissance look like an afternoon preschool session.
No one really knows.
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