“Don’t log in to ChatGPT!”

“Stay away from the artificial intelligence and ChatGPT concept stock market for now!”

In these past few days, there has been a sudden outcry about ChatGPT on various social media platforms and group chats. Users who have seen these messages are feeling unprecedented panic. This is because the reason for these voices is that ChatGPT is silently banning accounts on a large scale. Many people who saw the news tried to log in, only to find that their account was no longer there.

Want to register again? No chance, the official has already closed the registration channel, and it has not been reopened as of this morning.

source: https://chat.openai.com/

And since March 31, when the ban started until now, OpenAI has not made any statement, and the specific reason is unknown. In addition, recent events such as Italy banning the use of ChatGPT and Samsung claiming that there was a leak due to ChatGPT have further raised people’s concerns and doubts about ChatGPT. Therefore, various speculations are flying around, and the news of the bear market for ChatGPT concept stocks is also flooding the weekend.

So what is going on?

New registrations have been suspended, and Plus is not working either.

This round of large-scale account banning started around March 31.At that time, some people discovered that OpenAI had closed the new user registration channel, and those who logged in with existing accounts would see a prompt:

Registration is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

However, as of the time of writing, the registration channel has not been reopened.

And some people have found since the night of the 30th that after paying for Plus, they encountered situations where the subscription was not activated despite the deduction of payment. Some people’s Plus was originally working, but suddenly stopped working these past few days, and there is no record of it even in their billing. The event started to escalate on April 1st. More and more people reported that their accounts were banned, and people were spreading “precautions” in various platforms and group chats to avoid being banned.

Some are even calling out: “Don’t log in anymore!”

As the number of banned accounts increases, people have found that the bans seem to be indiscriminate, whether they have paid for Plus or only called the API, they are all at risk of being banned. So far, OpenAI has not made any explanations, so the specific reasons behind the bans are unclear. Currently, there are mainly two types of speculations: “batch registration” and “API call ban”.

On the one hand, many believe that the hardest-hit area of this ban is the accounts that were registered in batches before.

Many netizens have said that their manually registered accounts are still active, but they have lost access to some income channels.On the other hand, some speculate that the reason for the API call ban may be that previous account behavior raised suspicions of API abuse.

For example, if a person has multiple accounts that access API services, and it is detected that they are constantly changing APIs to make requests on the same or similar IP, this violates the rules of OpenAI API usage. Additionally, April 1 was the day that the OpenAI API Key’s free call limit expired, and some people think that OpenAI was worried that a large number of accounts would pay to buy tokens these few days, causing the API to be depleted, so they banned some accounts first…

These speculations are not baseless, as Midjourney previously stopped free usage, partially due to excessive usage.

On March 28, Midjourney’s founder and CEO stated that many people registered a large number of new accounts to only use the free limit to avoid paying. This worsened the temporary shortage of GPUs and caused the services for paying users to be paralyzed.

Of course, in addition to these speculations about the accounts themselves having problems, some people have analyzed the usefulness of ChatGPT:

ChatGPT will increase our productivity, so…

Indeed, some people have said that their work efficiency has greatly decreased after their accounts were banned.

And recently, many companies have introduced ChatGPT into their workflow. It is unclear whether this ban will have an impact. In addition, with the news of Samsung’s employee uploading company data to ChatGPT and Italy’s ban on ChatGPT, many predict that ChatGPT concept stocks will plummet on Monday. However, unlike the widespread impact on users, the stock market’s performance is different from many people’s predictions over the weekend.

On Monday morning, the ChatGPT sector led the gains, with multiple stocks rising more than 5%.

How to determine if your account has been banned?

However, it is important to note that many accounts have not been affected and can still be used normally. So everyone should not panic excessively and carefully determine if their accounts are still active…

The judgment method is roughly as follows:

3. Other error messages, such as “not available in your…” may not be a problem with the account.

So, is there no solution once the account is banned?Not exactly. As stated in the error message, you can directly appeal through the official website.

There are even some guides available now for appealing, which suggest expressing your precious content in the account in English and emphasizing that you have not done anything wrong and will not in the future, hoping to be unbanned.The specific details still depend on everyone’s own performance…

Anyway, this time, it may be even more difficult for many people to reopen the door of ChatGPT.