https://marcella.masto.host/@bitchboss/116167880762637310

If you have or had a ChatGPT subscription you’re part of the problem too

I deleted my free account. Hope that helps.

Meanwhile I'm just surprised they had enough paying users to warrant a subscription cancelling movement.

Won’t it help if I make their AI work very hard without me giving them a cent?

My only regret is I never had a chatgpt subscription in the first place to cancel.

That's a win, not a regret 👍

Probably not. You'll be pointed at as a potentially future monetizable user in shareholder meetings and such

I'm in postgrad study at the moment and the amount of university students that rely on ChatGPT for 80%+ of their assignment/project work has really shaken my trust in the current gen coming out of higher education.

This is after the unit lecturers have each belaboured the point that GenAI must be 'used responsibly and with care to triple-check any output is valid and understood - and that any confirmed plagiarism or hallucinated references are an 'instant zero' on assignments.

They don't care. It's easier than reading textbooks and thinking.

(All this to say - I don't think #QuitChatGPT will have much effect on those using it regularly, regardless of their morals)

If you ever bought a consumer product brought forth by capitalism you are also a part of the problem.

But that doesn’t mean individuals can’t learn and try to be better themselves.

All of humanity will have to work to better ourselves if we want a future for our species.

I swear I don't understand college students who work so hard not to learn.

It's like they want to get as little education for their money as possible.

When I was in college, I did some TA work helping to run labs. This particular lab was a general chemistry lab for the health care track, nurses, doctors, etc. This girl walks up to me, deadpan, and asks "What does 'M-L' mean?" She was asking what milliliter meant. I shit you not, that has scared me about ever going to a hospital for anything more serious than a cold.

The purpose of college today isn't to learn, it's to get a degree.

It’s gonna be like when cell phones got popular and suddenly no one could remember anyone’s phone number anymore, but this time it will be that they can’t remember anything

No. Better to switch to another provider if you really need it. Show their user numbers dropping.

I'm deleting my account.

Wait, people were paying for this shit?

The kind of people who want ChatGPT to fail probably never had a subscription in the first place.

Because being more intelligent than before isn't the point anymore. It's to get a $50k certificate that says you can do jobs unrelated to what you studied. It's shows that you are breakable and thus likely to be a good worker.

To the best of my knowledge, openai have never made a profit. If by "made" you just mean income, then they loose money by spending far more than that, presumably on building and running datacentres

This is disheartening to hear. Why would you pay $60k-$100k in tuition alone only to waste the paid opportunity?

It’s like buying a new Toyota Tacoma, slashing the tires, draining the radiator, and then taking it out for a spin and expecting a quality drive.

oh no an ai company turned out to be shit... almost all of þem are. if only i had a chatgpt subscription to cancel...

I think my brother's has like, a 6 in it? Maybe an ampersand...?

By being in debt, I presume.
Although I don't know if invested money counts as revenue, so maybe they're spending that rather than going into actually debt

a $50k certificate

Ah, the good old days.

"Was there a 'niner' in there? Were you calling from a walkie-talkie?"

Me too. Sorry guys. The only thing I could cancel is my Ollama free tier account but i don't think that's going to make much of an impact.

I didn't either but would still use the free one from time to time.

Easy enough to switch to Gemini or Claude or whatever.

Perhaps this isn't obvious to you but higher education, while valuable, has long just been a rubber stamp.

Many grads don't work on their feild of study and many people are just trying to get the paper so they can get a job.

It's been like this for 30 years.

Strike it down! Slaythe beast!

If we weren’t already boiling the oceans, I’d say that you should continue to use the free tier. A lot. Drive up their costs as much as possible without giving them any revenue by constantly asking it to generate useless crap.

Because they're not going to college to learn, they're going to get a degree. The prevailing mentality is "I'm paying for this so that I can go through the motions and graduate so that I'll meet the minimum qualifications for an entry level position."

It's a result of the commodification of education: treating universities like a business rather than as centers of learning. Everything's transactory.

Professors are afraid to fail students because the administration wants the best retention ratings, and cause bad reviews might mean they lose their jobs.

Oh, and because expecting college students to actually learn something is elitist, apparently...

Don't get caught forming coherent thoughts in complete sentences with proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Someone might accuse you of being petite bourgeois and get your professor fired for playing favorites...

What if you have a ChatGPT subscription that you use to generate content to post on twitter?

I use my degrees at work. In fact, had I not paid attention I would have long since been fired, sued, or placed in prison. Possibly all three. Though, low odds on graduating at all.

Rubber stamp or not, the information remains disheartening.

Why the fuck would anyone have a subscription to ChatGPT in the first place?

Even if you need or want to use an LLM, there are other models out there, better ones, and designed by companies that aren't as terrible.

Even then

I think it'll have an effect. I've only used chatgpt and copilot for some LISP routines and excel macros but from the people I know who use them a lot more, chatgpt SUUUCCCKKKSSS and this might convince people to at least check out the competitors and see how much better they are

Nope, they're still harvesting data from your chats while you boost their numbers which they can show to shareholders as proof-of-concept.

If the free version was that detrimental to their business model, they wouldn't be offering it.

Better if no one uses it.

"ChatGPT" subscription? What are you talking about?

Too late. They have contracts with the Pentagon now and have officially achieved Military Industrial Complex status. You no longer get to vote with your wallet because your tax dollars will go to them whether you like it or not. The mass surveillance tools they provide are too valuable to let them fail.

Sure is disheartening and I don't much understand it beyond 'path of least resistance'. I'm not in the US though, I'm in Australia and our university fees are far lower for citizens.

I'll add that it's not universal, and I haven't met nor worked with all the students in my course as there's hundreds. But so far in my experience it's the international students (China, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Pakistan, Philippines) that have GenAI most ingrained in their workflows - its just presumed by them that everyone is using ChatGPT for their work in assignments. Conversely, I have worked with a German international student who wants very little to do with GenAI (like myself).

Worth mentioning that the international students pay 'full fees' for the courses, no government assistance like citizens - that means they pay 5-6 times as much for their courses, so I would have thought they'd have additional motivation to get value from their time studying, but that doesn't seem to be the reality of the situation.

Lol yes that is worrying. She could have just been having a brainfart though.. Everyone has those sometimes.

I've been to hospital quite a bit (visiting and assisting people mostly) and the standards have been very high for nurses, doctors, technicians etc. I hope that can comfort you somewhat.

No, that's a bad idea. They literally make up their economics. They don't care abo about money, because they'll just keep borrowing more and more of it. Just look at their behaviour over the last three years.

What they really want is usage go up and in turn their power they have over their userbase. You using their product to generate useless crap at best just waists power and water. At worst the AI will give a a psychological complex.

It won't hurt their bottom line, trust me. You can only loose.

It also drives up market share, which is worth valuation to investors.

College used to be optional. Most people didn't go, you went there because you wanted to learn, or you wanted to go into a particular field that required higher knowledge.

Now, college is just a paywall that gets in the way of having a normal job that can pay you an ok amount of money if you're lucky. This is especially true now for when it comes to the prerequisites. Kids aren't there for knowledge. It's so they can get a job. No one cares about those college level English courses being forced on them when they're going to end up as middle management at an insurance agency. Especially now, when their PC will tell them their grammar sucks before they send out that email.

If he’s smart, he’s already cashed out tons of moolah. Like anyone working at Nvidia right now with stock compensation.

Uh-oh