I signed up about a year ago to OpenAI’s ChatGPT+ service. This unlocks unlimited (practically) queries for a fee of about $20 a month.
Today I cancelled that service, and I have some reasons why.
Not noble
There is no great nobility at the core of my decision to cancel my ChatGPT Plus service. My Mastercard number changed and OpenAI couldn’t process my fee. When faced with the cost of over $20 a month I realized I wasn’t actually getting remotely that kind of value from the service. Cancelling just made sense to me.
But that doesn’t mean that I lacked reasons for cancelling.
What is it for?
I couldn’t really find any use case for ChatGPT that justified it. Mostly I have been using its generative AI capability to generate images for this blog based on prompts. That isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the service. I could possibly see spending $5 a month for that, but not $20.
I am not writing code with ChatGPT. If I get back into coding I want to code, not use an LLM to vibe my way to fame and profit. I like coding: I’m weird that way.
I also don’t want to have friendly chats with ChatGPT. I’m not always a big fan of people, but I prefer them to the fake people that ChatGPT produces. Maybe I will find the right AI buddy one day, but that day has not yet arrived. I hate being lied to, and that is a big part of LLM behaviour.
The whole “there are four lights…oh, yes, you are right, there are five lights” behaviour of all the LLMs aggravates me. If you can’t count the lights then don’t make shit up just to make me happy. Admit your incompetence or find the answer.
Disillusionment
OpenAI / ChatGPT and the entire generative large language model (LLM) AI industry basically exists today to consume obscene amounts of electricity and money. AI also generates share price growth: not profit, and not even revenue- just share price growth. Essentially, nothing much of actual value to be honest.
If the AI was saving lives, curing cancer, creating new forms of faster than light space travel- okay, I can see investing $1 trillion a year on it. But the giant piles of guano we get just aren’t worth it. As long as the stock share price goes up that is all that matters… until you realize that share price is meaningless in the absence of any profitable revenue stream or even concept of a plan for one.
About $1 trillion being spent annually on AI at the moment: very roughly speaking of course. I would like to see that reassigned to spending on power infrastructure that better supports integration with renewable energy sources. Heck, build out renewable energy itself! Invest in passenger trains, and non-polluting autos. A trillion a year could do a lot for society.
Instead we are pissing it away on AI. AI is interesting in its current state, but it just isn’t worth that level of societal investment. My feeling is that this might be the year that the stock market itself finally starts to realize that they have bought far too many tulip bulbs and that the circular dealing involved in AI is just too damned toxic to keep going. That will hurt big-time when it happens, but it has to happen eventually.
None of this really is impacted at all by my withdrawal of the $20 a month I was paying ChatGPT for their services. But it all seems related to me.
