Subscriptions? You idiots are paying for this shit?
Businesses do and try to get employees to use it… Stupid
Well the fucked up part is businesses also want to see how well their “investment” AI is doing, which means tracking how much employees use the AI and other cooked up metrics. You can’t get away from it no matter how irritating it makes your job and life.
Its infuriating because now every single meeting is “BLARGH HOW CAN WE MAKE DA AI DO THIS? HOW CAN WE UTILIZE THE AI???!!!”
makes me want to scream.
All the time at work. Free tier and paid. Translate shit from foreign customers. Extract text from screen shots. There’s lots of uses, just like any other tool. But it’s a tool, it’s not fucking magic or the devil. Just a tool.
Educational institutions are buying microsoft services as a trend and we need them to boycott also.
Getting bus pass in my university takes 5 business days so they can “save cost on students who don’t use it.”
Meanwhile everyone’s student gmail implicitly has a subscription to copilot, gemini, and openai at the same time; it doesn’t matter if you are using them or not.
Paid by our tuition no doubt.
Honestly, people are probably going to start using it much less once they put in ads on the the low and free tiers.
They’re realizing they can’t turn profit over expenses when the VC money dries up without jacking price.
Same shit different fad. Offshoring was all the rage until the demand meant they started charging more, the quality went down, and the reality of cross-timezone management became obvious. Cloud was all the rage until the prices went up from demand and also kept running into outages, and now some companies are “re-inhousing” their infrastructure.
Cant’ wait till they realize they also can’t deliver at regular clip with only half the workers. Wont’ be soon enough, alas.
If you thought the banks were too big to fail, get ready for this fucking bailout
I don’t pay for AI. There is no real value in it at massive scale for it to be paid for me. Plus it is harmful. I can local host AI for small tasks like cleaning up some data.
Yep! I feel way, way safer when I use something running on my laptop as opposed to feeding things into the bottomless hole that is Microsoft or Anthropic.
All I want is something to double-check the verbiage of an email to make sure I’m not coming off like an asshole.
Also, why paying for AI? You can use it for free, and when you finish your free daily limit, you just switch to another AI: Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Le Chat, DeepSeek… rinse and repeat.
People pay for this shit?
It blows my mind people actually subscribe to mostly wrong answers.
I kinda wish I’d been using it so I could quit!
I’ve never used it. I play around with a local installation sometimes, that’s the extent of my experience with AI.
I initially subscribed to ChatGPT because I got a job as the only devops guy at an organization, when I had very limited devops experience, and ChatGPT essentially served as my mentor. I justified keeping it for a long time because it helped my productivity; bugs that I had no idea where to start with could be worked through given a few hours (or days) of back-and-forth.
As I climbed the learning curve, ChatGPT became proportionally less helpful, but I kept it because it’s kind of useful for rubber ducky debugging. I did find Copilot to be pretty handy for writing docstrings (especially for keeping consistent formatting conventions), but the actual code completions were more annoying than anything.
When all was said and done, I cancelled my ChatGPT and Copilot subscriptions because I’m taking on a mortgage tomorrow and I literally just can’t afford them. I have Ollama running on my homelab server, but I only have enough vRAM for a 7B-param model, and it kind of sucks ass, but whatever. At the end of the day, I like using my brain.
UPDATE (because I just thought of it after posting): I do think that “AI-as-a-mentor” is a good use-case of AI. It really helped me cut my teeth on the basics of Linux. I often find that it’s easier to learn when you have a working example of code or config that you can dissect than to bash your head against the wall just trying to figure out how to get something to run at all in the first place.
For my birthday challenge this year, I’m learning how to read and write Devanagari as a surprise to my Indian grandparents. I asked my local qwen model to generate some worksheets for me to practice with, and it totally flopped. It gave away all the answers. I do think ChatGPT would have done better, but maybe I could have gotten sufficient results with a better GPU.
Sorry but thinking of a shitty chatbot as your “mentor” is absolute brainrot.
I know AI is an emotionally charged topic, but I think your frustration is misdirected. I find that the best way to learn tech stuff is with hand-on experience, and to that end, it works pretty well to try something, ask why it didn’t work like I expected it to, and get instantaneous feedback. Or to start with a working example and pick it apart so I can learn the syntax. I’m not saying it’s a replacement for reading official documentation or figuring things out for yourself, but it makes it a lot easier to get started.
Fundamentally, I’m a humanist. I believe that we should use technology in a way that augments our brain instead of circumventing it. I don’t let AI write code for me, but I don’t really see the harm in having it present information in a digestible format.
I’ve always been bored by lectures and tutorials because they’re not good at meeting me at my level of experience. I don’t think anyone would argue that having a tutor/mentor who gives you individual attention and meets you where you at will help you climb the learning curve way faster. And when you’re in a situation where you don’t have a human mentor, AI can be pretty useful.
I worked at an organization where there were no senior software people and my supervisor told me you “hey, you created this dashboard – now deploy it”. My only relevant experience was having hosted a Minecraft server on Windows 10. After a few months of iterating with ChatGPT, I knew the basics of how to use containerization and deploy an app on a RHEL server. 3 years later, I’m doing it at a tech consulting firm, and I’m the guy everyone goes to for help writing containerfiles and compose files. They promoted me from data scientist (I have an MS in data science) to solutions architect, all because I used AI to learn the basics of Linux devops, and then got a shit ton of practice by self-hosting.
The point is we can’t compete with this saas ai products with our local models that runs on our poor homeservers. Affording a subscription is way more cheaper in shorter term.
this won’t be true anymore when the AI bubble bursts
In my perspective as a cs graduate, it’ll only have a decline instead of a pop. We’ve already exceeded the point of no return.
Never paid for it, but I would use it here and there. Never again, account deleted.
You can continue using it for free, it makes cost for them ;)
Well, I like that, but I also like the idea of not helping them train their model
I “used it” for a few afternoons, to marvel what its capable of. Writing coherent short stories and shitty Weird Al songs that work surprisingly well, but the novelty soon wore off and I have no real use for it. Its like the coolest toy ever, but it can only keep me entertained for so long.
I “used it” about 6 times since then, and every time has just been to demonstrate it for old people who dont know the internet.
I dont give them any valuable information about me and I never pay. I also only use it in the browser and not even that often
I just use Chinese AI atp. Deepseek and Kimi.
Glm also?
Nah I’m gonna use my free account to prompt a bunch if inane shit to drive up operating costs while poisoning their training data
