The Developer of the GPT4Free Project May Face Trial

OpenAI lawyers attentively look at the developer of the GPT4Free project, which provides free access to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. The company has formally demanded that he delete his repository within five days or he will face legal action.

And also information security specialists warned that Russian Cybercriminals Seek Access to OpenAI ChatGPT.

GPT4Free is a project created by a student named xtekky; it is published on GitHub and is very successful in reversing APIs to give anyone free access to the OpenAI language models.

Essentially, the development of xtekky tricks the OpenAI API by simulating requests from sites with paid accounts, such as the You.com search engine, WriteSonic, or Poe from Quora.

Thus, anyone using GPT4Free definitely violates the OpenAI Terms of Service. However, xtekky stated that he did not see this as a problem, because GPT4Free is intended solely for “educational purposes”. At the same time, the developer understood that “lawsuits may follow.”

As Tom’s Hardware now reports, the enthusiast has already had legal problems. So, according to xtekky, OpenAI sent him a letter demanding to remove the repository within five days, or he will have to appear in court.

At the same time, xtekky says that OpenAI is hardly worth dealing with it, since it does not connect directly to the company’s API, but only receives data from other sites that pay it for licenses. And if the owners of these sites have any problems with his scripts, they can contact him directly.

Xtekky has stated that it will happily remove scripts that use site-specific APIs, but only at the request of their owners. For example, he has already removed scripts for phind.com, ora.sh and writesonic.com. In addition, any site can block external exploitation of its internal APIs using a number of simple measures.

The enthusiast notes that he advised all site owners who contacted him to protect their APIs, but no one did. That is, even if he removes all the scripts from the repository, any other developer can easily repeat the same thing.

The developer says that he has decided not to remove the repository for now (the repository is actually running at the time of this writing) and intends to tell OpenAI that if they want to achieve removal, then the company should file a formal complaint for violation of the DMCA (“Digital Millennium Copyright Act”). ”) on GitHub rather than talking to him directly.

Also, according to xtekky, deleting the repository simply won’t do anything: