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This is why I use two separate ChatGPT accounts

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Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority

I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a recovering AI addict. While I’ve had mixed feelings about AI from the start, as someone who spends a lot of time lost in thought, I’ve found it can be a useful tool for ideation, proofreading, entertainment, and much more. Recently, I’ve started scaling back my usage for reasons beyond the scope of this article, but for a while, I actually had two paid ChatGPT accounts.

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, it’s a bit excessive. Still, in some cases, it really can make sense to have two accounts.

Would you ever consider having two AI accounts at once? 40 votes Yes, it's smart to seperate business and personal. 43 % Yes, but only if it's two different AI tools. 23 % No, it's a waste of resources and I get by fine with what I have. 33 % Other (Tell us in the comments) 3 %

It all started when I found myself constantly hitting usage limits for my personal projects and entertainment, leaving me in a lurch when I needed AI for work-related tasks. For those who don’t know, the ChatGPT Plus tier has different limits depending on the model. Some like the basic GPT 4o are virtually unlimited, while others have a firm daily or weekly count. For example, GPT 03 lets you send 100 messages a week, while 04-mini-high gives you 100 messages a day, and so 04-mini gives you 300 a day. I tend to rely the most on 03 and 04-mini-high outside of basic stuff like editing, because it is actually willing to tell you that you’re wrong, unlike many of the other models that are people-pleasers to the extreme. Realizing I was blowing through my message limits long before the week was up, I immediately started considering my options, including adding a Gemini subscription instead of ChatGPT. Truthfully, I had tried both before and always found myself coming back to ChatGPT, so the decision was basically made for me.

At that point, I began manually migrating some of my old chats over to the new account, basically copying and pasting core logs so ChatGPT and deleting records from my original mixed-use account. As a freelancer, my goal was to make sure anything related to clients was separated from my personal projects, which were mostly entertainment or experimental (like messing around with the API and similar tools just to learn).

It wasn’t even just about the limits. I found this separation helpful for more than just avoiding blowing through my limits on the wrong thing. As you might know, ChatGPT can learn your preferences. It’s not exactly learning or memory in the traditional sense, but instead it basically creates an abstract pattern of your communication styles and preferences. Let’s just say my way of talking about personal matters is very different from my professional voice. Lots of cursing and the like.

After splitting my usage, I noticed that ChatGPT actually became better suited for the specific tasks I was performing on each account, as it understood my preferences for each use case a little better. That’s probably an oversimplification of how ChatGPT works, but you get the idea.

These days, I no longer pay for two accounts since I don’t rely as heavily on ChatGPT or any AI tool anymore, but it’s useful to keep my old logs around, and so I still have a ChatGPT Plus account for business and another free account that is for personal use. This way, I also retain the option of renewing my paid subscription if my usage habits change again in the future.

How do you sign up for two accounts, and is this a TOS violation?

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