ChatGPT Is Telling Some People It Senses Unusual Activity, but What Does That Mean?

The rise of generative AI, and of ChatGPT in particular, has already transformed some things about the way we live. While plenty of people go days at a time without using it, others use it far more often, and some have even become attached to it either as part of their routines or even a little emotionally.

If you use ChatGPT regularly, you might have come across an error in which it tells you that it senses "unusual activity" from your account. If you've received that notification, you might have been understandably confused about what it meant. Here's what we know.

Some users receive a message from ChatGPT at seemingly random intervals that says, "Our systems have detected unusual activity from your system. Please try again later."

It's unclear what this message means, and typically, it goes away for users if they retry later, as the prompt suggests. Users might get the message after they've been using ChatGPT for hours, or after they've sent just a few messages.

Some people who have flagged the issue on Reddit suggest that it might be associated with the browser extension Superpower ChatGPT, and added that when they turned off that extension, they stopped getting the message.

Others, though, never downloaded the extension, and still get the error message at seemingly random intervals. Ultimately, then, it's hard to say for sure what might be causing the issue, or if there's a clear way to resolve it.

Given the number of users who've faced the problem, though, it's clearly not something that any one person or system is doing. Instead, it seems like this error message is coming from ChatGPT, although it's unclear why it seems to implicate the user's system, especially if the user can walk away and come back without changing anything. Ultimately, then, it seems there's nothing to do but try again later.

Ultimately, this message seems to be associated with attempts by ChatGPT to ensure that its services are used by real people, and not by bots. It's essentially a guard from one AI to prevent it from being abused by other AIs.

What seems clear, though, is that sometimes ChatGPT falsely identifies actual humans as bots and stops them from using the tool as a result.

OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, is regularly working to update the tool so that it's more useful and also so that people who use it regularly don't get booted out or accused of being bots. It's a simple goal but one that requires constant effort.

ChatGPT was the tool that first kicked off the generative AI craze, and it remains one of the most popular. Although it's far from perfect, the improvements that the tool has made since it was first launched suggest that AI keeps getting better, and as long as people aren't prevented from using it, it's become more and more useful as well.