Literally every single time I try open their app, I get asked to click the button again to verify that I am indeed human.
On top of that, it doesn’t always work for some mysterious reason, occasionally it ends up short circuiting and looping for a while before showing me the prompt again, and only lets me in on the second or third attempt.
I do realize that since I AM using a VPN to access it, I might be seeing this prompt more frequently than others, but many other sites use the same CloudFlare protection mechanism and I have yet to see one that shows me the prompt as frequently as OpenAI does.
Just thought it’s funny because it’s literally a bot asking me to verify that I’m not a bot.
I mean, it probably wants to make sure you’re using the API for programmatic access so they can charge you for it instead of having you abuse the free tier.
Not sure if they’re still around, but in the early days, before the API was released, there were some libraries that simply accessed the browser interface to let you programmatically create chat completions. I believe the first ChatGPT Twitter bot was implemented like that.
This post isn’t so much about whether it’s necessary from a technical standpoint (it likely is), it’s just an observation on the sheer irony and annoyance of it being that way, that’s all.