News

South African “MobileGPT” charges a lot of money for free products

Luis Monzon

22nd May 2023

A South African developer has built a service that combines ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and other plugins to be accessed directly through WhatsApp called MobileGPT.
While it does provide extra convenience to use these platforms, it costs $20 a month via a subscription plan.
The products, or similar, that MobileGPT sells can be found online via desktop or mobile completely free of charge.

*Update as of 04/06/2023 – MobileGPT has decreased its monthly subscription price from $20 to $9.99

Original article follows:

A South African developer’s integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT model into WhatsApp, touted as “revolutionary” for school children, is rather expensive, especially as it offers many services that are widely and freely available.

Called “MobileGPT,” the platform leverages OpenAI’s technology (namely GPT3.5-turbo and GPT-4) and allows users to talk to ChatGPT via WhatsApp, with some constraints. It costs, at the time of writing, $20 (~R387) a month to use after a 24-hour free trial.

We found that MobileGPT offers a fast and convenient way to access many of these products and users will have to pay for that convenience. However, through a bit of research and time, all of these products can be accessed for free.

Apart from the chatbot, MobileGPT makes use of AI-powered image generator StableDiffusion, which is free, a method to summarise web pages, and a way to generate Word documents with ChatGPT – which is probably its best feature and one that you will usually have to pay for unless you have an API key. These are all wrapped up with a bow with extra emojis in almost every automated response.

It was spun up in a month by software developer Bertha Kgokong, who told SABC in an interview she wanted to take ChatGPT and make it even more accessible.

“With MobileGPT we took it a step further,” she explained, “and said let’s make it even more accessible and put it on WhatsApp.”

Typing “ChatGPT” into the Play Store produces thousands of third-party apps that use OpenAI’s technology, or API, to allow users to talk to ChatGPT – even though ChatGPT is available without cost on OpenAI’s website on desktop, mobile, and now through an iOS app.

These apps are banking on the AI craze to expose users to advertisers or perhaps, like MobileGPT, sell subscriptions or charge other costs. Many of these are seen as scams.

Kgokong herself said the MobileGPT was initially blocked on Facebook, Twitter and Google and its accounts were suspended because it was thought to be a scam.

“I had to go through so many reviews, or appeals to prove and submit evidence that this is not a scam. And later we found that other people are doing these kinds of scams,” the developer said.

MobileGPT does make it easier for individuals who are disadvantaged by the digital divide to access the power of ChatGPT and StableDiffusion, or rather, it would.

The population of South Africa is increasingly becoming more and more online with current estimates at around 112.7 million cellular mobile connections against a population of 60 million.

While most South Africans have access to mobile internet through smartphones, PCs or notebooks are still rare in comparison. This could be a reason for the creation of MobileGPT, to grant the population below the poverty line (around 40 percent of South Africans) access to ChatGPT and its advantages directly from WhatsApp.

However, the $20 per month needed to use the platform completely erases this. Especially, when it is effectively selling free products that can be found online through a quick Google search.

It uses the StableDiffusion XL model to generate images through prompts that can be given directly into WhatsApp, and it uses a workaround to generate Microsoft Word documents with ChatGPT.

Kgokong says that the platform can benefit entrepreneurs by saving them time and effort, especially in terms of research and planning but we would suggest that rather they save the money and find access online for free.

Another use for MobileGPT is for educational purposes, something that has institutions and teachers concerned. ChatGPT can be used to generate entire essays or homework answers, and easily bypass the learning process.

Another concern is that ChatGPT, and even worse, third-party platforms like MobileGPT, can give incorrect answers as fact to students. It has received bans across the world’s schools for these matters.

Kgokong believes this is not the answer.

“We need to now teach differently,” she begins. “We didn’t say let’s ban the calculator because people can’t learn maths. Let’s use ChatGPT to teach. We don’t want to stop technology and progress.”

We agree with her, but believe that South Africa’s learners deserve free access to these technologies, unlike MobileGPT, so we are including some links below for every product offered by Kgokong, but without having to pay a single cent:

MobileGPT can generate research for you using LiveData, through what we believe is a ChatGPT plugin.

This works quite well, but the same can be achieved using ChatGPT itself, or through the likes of Bing Chat, by prompting it to first, provide links to research articles, and second, ask it to summarise the information.