Simple. LLMs are made by techbros, who have operated on a "make thing, give it away to capture the market, monetise the users and data later" model since the 90s. You may not have noticed that they're all pivoting to the monetisation part now. OpenAI is putting ads in responses. Anthropic charges a lot of money. All the LLMs are switching to a freemium model, where they offer a basic feature set for free and up-charge for more use or more features.
I hadn't, no. My broke ass had never been able to afford to be an early adopter. Only place I use it is as tools in other tools (like background removal in a video editing program.), if I do a Google search I always add -ai to not see the AI at the top.
I don't think it's just a money thing though. There are AI toasters with subscription models now. If they weren't charging money somehow at this point I think I would be more suspicious of it.
Why the push to get everyone and everything to use AI so hard though?
To make this discussion a little more crackpot, I think that Disclosure Day isn't going to be aliens, it's going to be that we actually are in a simulation. Whether it's a game, a historical simulation to find something out, or just to get people's opinions like in Simulacron-3, or plugged into some sort of life simulator like in Rick and Morty. Because everything I've seen about Disclosure Day is that it's big and most people won't be able to handle it. But maybe if they are used to interacting with AI, things they know aren't "real" people it might ease the pain of not being real themselves.
Because think about it; if there really is a God or Creator or whatever, something that gave us life there are so many religions on Earth right now, only one can be ultimately correct. On the scale of human history 2, 000 years is a tiny fraction of when our specific branch of humanity has been around. How many versions of Christianity have there been? Belief is a powerful thing and finding out that there is a god but it's not going to take you to rapture because actually it's some obscure religion you've never heard of before because we haven't discovered that brand of human yet would be pretty soul-crushing.
Ever play the Sims when it was good? You could put your Sim into the pool and take away the ladder, watch them drown. Didn't matter, right? They weren't real. (Personally I had a painting troll. I built a basement with no way up and just had him paint endlessly making money for the whole household. They never knew about each other. I know I would feel horrible if I was shown undisputable proof that they were alive and felt something. That's real enough for me. Then we're told that it's us too.
I've thought for a while now we're in a historical simulation to find out what went wrong, and I thought it was social media. In case you couldn't tell though - I think it's AI not social media now.
But hey, we could easily be some AI somewhere running through scenarios of what could happen, not what did happen.
Either way I don't think most people would be able to existentially handle the thought of it all being a simulation.
