OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT Plus, a Pilot Subscription Plan, at $20 per Month

ChatGPT owner OpenAI said on Wednesday it is launching a pilot subscription plan for its popular AI-powered chatbot, called ChatGPT Plus, for $20 (nearly Rs. 1,600) per month. Subscribers will receive access to ChatGPT during peak times, faster responses and priority access to new features and improvements. 

In a blog post published by OpenAI on Wednesday, the company introduced ChatGPT Plus, which will be initially rolling out only for the customers in the United States. The company will soon extend the access availability through inviting people from its waitlist, probably over the coming weeks. OpenAI will also be rolling out ChatGPT to more regions in the near future. 

ChatGPT Plus comes will certain benefits for the users, including normal access to the platform during peak usage, a quicker response time and priority access to upcoming features and improvements. Until the roll out of the subscription plan to other regions, the company will continue to provide free access to its users. 

On Wednesday, OpenAI also has released a software tool to identify text generated by artificial intelligence. ChatGPT is a free program that generates textin response to a prompt, including articles, essays, jokes and even poetry, which has gained wide popularity since its debut in November, while raising concerns about copyright and plagiarism. 

The AI classifier, a language model trained on the dataset of pairs of human-written and AI-written text on the same topic, aims to distinguish text that is written by AI. It uses a variety of providers to address issues such as automated misinformation campaigns and academic dishonesty, the company said.

In its public beta mode, OpenAI acknowledges the detection tool is very unreliable on texts under 1,000 characters, and AI-written text can be edited to trick the classifier. 

Since ChatGPT debuted in November and gained wide popularity among millions of users, some of the largest US school districts, including New York City, have banned the AI chatbot over concerns that students will use the text generator to cheat or plagiarise. 

Others have created third-party detection tools including GPTZeroX to help educators detect AI-generated text. 

OpenAI said it is engaging with educators to discuss ChatGPT's capabilities and limitations, and will continue to work on the detection of AI-generated text.