Ask HN: ChatGPT Plus now showing captchas constantly?

24 points

2 years ago

I noticed a recent development and wanted to ask whether anyone else has a similar experience. I have been a paying ChatGPT Plus subscriber next to some API use since they have offered this product and have never had any issues, never used the service for spamming or in what I'd consider a manner incompatible with their TOS, and have in the roughly six months rarely hit the four-hour usage limit, certainly not in the last two weeks. Additionally, I am not currently connected via a VPN or a corporate internet connection

Despite all this, I have now noticed that any request that goes beyond a quick text answer requires solving a captcha [0]. Additionally, even after solving one and getting output (that has become less reliable in my personal test on top), I get another one before any additional request gets processed. Previously, OpenAI has enforced a Cloudflare captcha for accessing the page, either during high traffic times or when accessing the site via a public VPN, but never directly after a request.

I wanted to ask whether any of you have experienced something similar. For me, at least, captchas are a massive nuisance. They break the flow I like to use LLMs for (back and forth bouncing of ideas), are an accessibility nightmare, and are generally barely acceptable for free websites that need to limit fraudulent traffic. On a paid service with a reliable, long-paying customer, it is frankly insulting and makes switching fully to Anthropic more attractive than ever, even though gpt-4o still does certain tasks in my field more reliably with less prompting compared to Claude 3.5 Sonnet or 3 Opus.

Am I the only one affected, or are you encountering something similar lately?

[0] https://imgur.com/S6qmCYy

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