OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently brought its artificial intelligence bot to phones with the ChatGPT iPhone app. The mobile version of the chatbot has already climbed the ranks and become one of the most popular free apps on the App Store right now. However, before you jump headfirst into the app, beware of getting too personal with the bot and putting your privacy at risk.
Until now, plenty of ‘imposter’ apps have floated around app stores trying to capitalize on the generative AI boom, so it makes sense that OpenAI would want to get its own app out into the world.
The official app is free (the paid version of ChatGPT is supported on the app but it’s not necessary to use it). This is a huge plus considering other variations of AI chatbot apps on the market require a weekly subscription fee, making them super costly if not outright scams. You can also ‘talk’ to ChatGPT using speech-to-text, which makes a lot of sense for a conversational AI product.
The iOS app does come with an explicit trade-off that users should be aware of. Most of us are aware of the fact that ChatGPT does just, ahem, make things up sometimes, so there's lots of room for improvement to its responses – but when you open the app on your phone, you get an interesting warning about sharing personal information because “Anonymized chats may be reviewed by our AI trainer to improve our systems.”
OpenAI’s privacy policy says that when you “use our services, we may collect personal information that is included in the input, file uploads, or feedback you provide”. This basically means that if you ask ChatGPT questions that contain any personal information (read: facts about you which you’d rather not share to a living soul) it’ll be sent to OpenAI and could be read by a human reviewer. And that’s a big deal.
