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Free AI Will Cost Us
There’s no such thing as a free lunch… or a free chatbot
Like most things available on the internet for “free,” artificial intelligence is not really free.
As with “free” social media sites and search engines, we should assume that somebody, somewhere, is making money or planning to make money off of our use of these tools. This means that either a) we are paying in some other way — with our data, for example, which may be used to train the next model — or b) we are in that sunny period in the lifecycle of a tech product, when its makers offer the product for free to grow their userbase before the VC money runs out and they have to, you know, make a profit. They’ll do this the way they always do: by eliminating or worsening the free version of the product on which you’ve come to depend, nudging you toward the paid tier.
I don’t begrudge these AI companies their profits. They are, after all, corporations, and we live in a capitalist society. One of the cardinal sins of internet culture is the belief that everything online should be free. It’s an idea that has hollowed out important industries (journalism comes to mind) and led many creative people to find themselves unable to make a living, even with excellent, popular work. People should get paid if they provide things of value to the world!
