I don’t think we realize how good we have it right now. ChatGPT is unbiased (configurable solely and fully by the user) and truly tries its best to be useful. It’s surely a question of time before OpenAI lets advertisers pay them to introduce product placement and subconscious biases into the LLM in exchange for cash. This could make eg. all medical advice it gives make it seem like you need one specific, sponsoring, medication. What alternatives are there for getting the current experience when that happens? I wouldn’t mind paying a small subscription to cover compute costs and retain neutrality.
You couldn’t pay me to talk to ChatGPT. I need to be tricked into it
That’s an excellent point, here are 3 ways you can be tricked into using a chatbot:
- 📝Interact in the comment section on a popular reddit post
- 🧑💼 Have a co-worker who is a secret north korean spy
- 📖 Buy a self published book on Amazon released after 2022
This comment was written by a human
Funny—you say that, yet your longer, less jovial and more coherent posts already sound like someone who’s been secretly attending night classes with it.
That’s a good imitation of AI quipping, but you know very well that’s not what bothers you about how I talk. You are now blocked for being annoying on purpose when I gave you new information. You’re typical
You, kind Sir, have been tricked into talking with an AI. Pathetic.
I had a subscription for 3 months or so.
I haven’t found ChatGPT to be all that useful. My primary use is in TTRPGs. Story hooks and very generic things sure. But if I ask for anything specific to the rules for one specific TTRPG, even giving it the text to reference, it still comes up with absolutely unreliable nonsense. A mashup of things from several different TTRPGs. Even when asked a direct question “what’s the stat-block for a zombie in the PDF I just gave you?” And it responds with something completely made up.I have both Proton and Kagi. Kagi offers access to most of the major LLMs. Proton has their own. They all work more less the same. ChatGPT is nothing special realy.
I wouldn’t mind paying a small subscription to cover compute costs and retain neutrality.
If Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. are anything to go by, big tech has found it much more profitable to serve you ads (and sell your data) than take a pittance from you to avoid them. Don’t hold out hope for anything like what you’re describing.
You still get ads if you pay Netflix or Amazon.
Do you use a different ChatGPT than everyone else? Because GPT-5 is already a pretty enshittified version. GPT-3 and GPT-4o were lucky outliers and still had lots of issues.
They’re losing money and their customers do, too.
claude.ai for text, krea.ai for media, and huggingface.co for everything else. Until the tides change again, anyway. The wave of enshittification is ever swelling.
Nice. What would you recommend for the deep search feature that chatgpt has?
when? its like smartphones and have never been that great.
I think people are letting their “Fuck AI” mindset (which I agree with) interfere with the meaning of your post.
AI (all of them) are currently in the “growth at any cost” phase. This is where they burn mountains (and apparently oceans) of cash to get their product in use everywhere they possibly can, and get people hooked on it. Most people around here think that it will never get beyond this point, but let’s play it out anyway.
At some point, everyone selling it needs to start showing a profit. It’s not a cheap venture, and it sure as fuck isn’t being done as some service to humanity. It needs to pay massive dividends to recoup the massive investments.
You’re thinking advertising and the like. I don’t think that’s big enough.
AI, collectively, is a multi-trillion dollar investment. This is built entirely on the promise of eliminating payroll for a fuck-ton of people, more than the trillions it’s costing. Adopters (users) are also expecting to keep that “profit”.
Doctorow’s process of enshittification is that the current phase would be to get businesses hooked at the low price, and fire all of the people that currently do it. Of course, many will, since that is in their short-term interest.
The next phase is to then extract that value as well. I would expect AI to develop complex and expensive licensing models. If it’s saving your company the salary of an $80k/year graphics artist, OpenAI/Anthropic/Microsoft/etc is going to want, and feel entitled, to charge $40k/year for it. And those same businesses will pay, because it’s still cheaper than the real person.
TL;DR: The future of AI is AutoCAD.
I would be seriously surprised if it wasn’t happening already because it’s the only way I can imagine them making money. Say, Disney pays OpenAI so that overall output is 3% more positive which scales quickly with the number of ChatGPT users that mistake it for a search engine. That kind of marketing benefits from not being blatant.
I just run local and ignore the subscription tools.
