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Comment by resiros | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug here for those (like the author) who are using GPT in your projects and finding the costs to be too high.

We're building an open source wrapper around ChatGPT that lets you use it programmatically as an API or from Python or in CLI. Best of all, it's completely free! So it is great for testing the waters on a hobby project.

Check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/mmabrouk/chatgpt-wrapper

p.s. Just to answer all the comments below. OpenAI currently does not provide an API to ChatGPT. Our goal is not to abuse ChatGPT, but to provide tools for hobbiest to leverage it (by creating a power shell around it, making workflows around it, even using templates...) until an official API is available. As soon as an official API is available, we would integrate it in our CLI. In any case, chatGPT has hard query limits that would not allow you to use our project for any heavy lifting!

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This is great BUT should come with a buyer beware warning.

ChatGPT doesn't have an API and this looks like it will break T&CS.

Fine for a PoC, pet project perhaps but you can't expect anyone to build a commercial offering on the back of this.

Having said all that I read this story on Axios. Either BS or Fiat and other firms have been given commercial access to ChatGPT.

https://www.axios.com/2023/02/28/chatgpt-ai-sell-fiat-cars

... Isn't chatGPT already available as an API?

Or is this just a wrapper to the chatGPT public and free frontend?

If thats the case I don't think this is fair use.

This is hooking into the ChatGPT UI API, which is something OpenAI does not like to see and could result in banning of the account. Of course, since it's using playwright to simulate a browser, it might be hard to detect, but still, I'd be cautious.

I don't even get why people wouldn't use normal GPT API (OpenAI completions) instead. Isn't it exactly the same except that ChatGPT is primed to be more conversational (which in many cases as the one in the OP is just noise anyway)?

There are some differences. For example ChatGPT underwent an extra finetuning step using reinforcement learning and it supports 8k tokens instead of 4k.

Yep, they have an API.

they dont have api for chatgpt, they have api for davinci

$6 for about 100 pages of world-building honestly sounds not that bad. And that's before implementing any cost-saving measures.

Queries with lots of context (like in this example) can quickly rack up the costs, but I've never felt that they are prohibitive for personal projects. The problems only start when you want to publish something other people can use, and at that point abusing ChatGPT sounds like a bad idea too.

Given that ChatGPT doesn't have a public facing API, I assume this goes against their usage policy?

They didn't care for any "usage policy" when scraping whole internet and whatever else available for the purpose of building their product

Very similar to google's behavior with google scholar (and pretty much everything else). They built up according to one rule, but then we can't do the same thing to them. Funny that.

Well they used common crawl which respects individual site policies such as robots.txt. https://commoncrawl.org/big-picture/frequently-asked-questio...

So I think that's nonsense

I don't think that's true. For example, someone copying the web (but still respecting robots.txt) and claiming it's their own would be problematic surely?

This is only one small step away from blatantly copying.

Wait, are we still talking about usage policies?

Seems like a different discussion

Well, I think the point is that robots.txt != usage_policy

We probably need a license.txt convention to resolve this.

Would it also apply to humans that read and remember the content?

That depends on the wording in license.txt.

In general, automated systems and humans are considered different by the law. For example: looking out the window and noticing that your neighbor is going to the shop is ok; building an automated system that tracks people everywhere: not ok.

Agreed, but it sounded like your initial concern was:

> someone copying the web and claiming it's their own would be problematic surely?

Is it ok for humans to repurpose, repackage and regurgitate knowledge they've "scraped" and not software?

I'm not a judge/lawyer but that might depend on the scale on which it is happening.

> they used common crawl which respects individual site policies such as robots.txt

Nice, so what? I seriously doubt that authors of the content crawled by CommonCrawl agreed to terms that their content will be used by openai. Moreover CC seems to be opt-in by default according to their faq:

> You configure your robots.txt file which uses the Robots Exclusion Protocol to block the crawler. Our bot’s Exclusion User-Agent string is: CCBot. Add these lines to your robots.txt file and our crawler will stop crawling your website

Again, I doubt that plenty of people are putting CC specific rules into their robots.txt, moreover I'm not naive and I doubt that in our reality where "move fast and break things" is THE motto for any big corpo any rules like that are respected at all.

I mean even if you really want to believe they’ve broken every rule in the book, the concept of two wrongs making a right is still a poor take.

Be that as it may, they still might lock down your account.

They do have an API, the docs for it is at platform.openai.com/overview

I think you're referring to GPT3, which is distinct from ChatGPT

Does this comply with Open AI's terms of service?

I’ve used this. Thanks! Nice cutting-edge work!

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