• ultranaut@lemmy.world
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      Last I saw they have something like 900,000,000 active users with around 50,000,000 on a paid plan of some form.

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    I need one clarification : If I start using chatGPT like crazy, without a subscription, does this help (by making user numbers look good) or hinder (by burning computing resources for no revenue) the company ?

    • Ironfacebuster@lemmy.world
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      I’d say both, but it probably hinders the people having to live next to the data centers more than the company with effectively infinite money

  • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    I hate chatbots because they are an affront to personhood, language, and the very concept of meaning. You hate chatbots because some of the manufacturers donate to a political party in a failing empire.

    We are allies

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      I hate chatbots because they don’t work. If any of this technology actually operated as advertised I would be ecstatic. But none of it does.

      Not only has AI failed to give us a warp drive, it’s also failed to do my very simple job for me.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    I have barely used any of the AI products that have been around for the last few years. But what little I have used them for they’ve been fairly adequate for my desires I can’t imagine paying for that though.

    Like I use co-pilot (because management insist we use it for something), to rewrite emails into corporate speak. And I guess it’s nice not to have to do that anymore but it’s not something I’d pay for.

    I just don’t understand these AI bros I really don’t.

    • bestelbus22@lemmy.world
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      I’m a programmer, AI is really good at programming and I use it everyday at work. But you really need to be careful and read and understand EVERY LINE the AI gave you and judge if it’s correct architecturally, maintainable, fits the direction of the product etc etc etc.

      I let it write tests and mundane mapping functions mostly, but it’s still pretty useful as an “assistant”.

      The tech bros all come from this programming world and I think they got a bit too enthousiastic about the technology. An LLM is not a human brain.

  • Rakonat@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

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

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, I appreciate the duck duck go ai chatbots, since they are free and don’t have the limit that using chatgpt directly for free had. Plus you can select other models (haven’t even been using chatgpt).

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      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.

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        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.

        • DeckPacker@lemmy.world
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          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.

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

          • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            And data collection. People think they’re good if they just don’t give it personal info but you’re definitely being fingerprinted and tracked. If they haven’t already they’ll eventually partner with meta or google (in the case of Gemini that’s obviously already done) to match any fingerprinting to much denser profiling. Plus they’re designed in a way to encourage you to let your guard down and talk casually, which disarms you and makes it more likely you mention identifying info they can’t determine from IP and fingerprinting.

            OpenAI has already added advertisement so this is definitely occurring. No one buys ads in this day and age without robust audience targeting

            • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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              Well, continual usage doesn’t really help with fingerprinting. They already got that.

              I’d say, if you’re going to do this (you shouldn’t) the prompts should be fed by another LLM, and just let them create garbage together. I’m sure OpenAI likely uses user prompts for training, so this fucks up their training data.

          • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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            Yeah this is all Dot Com 1.0 bubble economics bullshit. How soon they forget.

  • Glytch@lemmy.world
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    Unfortunately I can’t help with the acceleration. Can’t cancel a subscription that never started

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        Well…I’m not saying that’s a bad idea, per se, but…if you are going to do this, make it blatently obvious it was a break-in.

        Then, put several rubber duckies in the water tank of their toilets. Big enough that they won’t fit in the hole.

        See, it’s the type of thing that they won’t discover for months/years. They’ll long have forgotten about the break-in, and won’t connect the dots there.

        It will just be something that confuses the fuck out of them for the rest of their lives.

    • Joeffect@lemmy.world
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      Dude wtf did you just do… my subscription isn’t active any more after reading your comment…

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldM
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    Sorry. I can’t do that. I can’t cancel my subscription to Chatgpt. I just can’t…

    …because I never subscribed in the first place.

  • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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    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)

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca
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        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.

          • JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca
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            I mean you can probably still pull of a State University at $50k a year, right? I graduated highschool in 2010 so my data is definitely out of date but how much can a public school cost!?

            • crank0271@lemmy.world
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              According to US News & World Report, the national average cost of in-state tuition is $12,436 and the national average cost of out-of-state tuition is $29,815. So it sure is possible (on average), but just barely. I also randomly checked Florida State University and their tuition is $6,517 for in-state and $21,683 for out-of-state students so it’s a relative bargain.

              • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
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                three’s a VAST range in there and fsu is not a good school.

                the real point of college is even less about the paper and more about the networking. that’s what you pay for at a good school.

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        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…

        • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          This doesn’t match with my experience at a state school at all, lol. I get whether I put a period before or after my citation picked apart. Is this how students at private schools get treated?

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            I don’t know, I went to a community college. I don’t know what grades other people got on their essays, but sometimes we did peer revisions and I saw the quality of other people’s writing. They called me racist and elitist if I made too many grammar corrections, so I can only imagine what they said about the professor when they get a bad grade because I stopped correcting their grammar during proofreading.

            There’s also this thing that sometimes happens where the professor adjusts for privilege in grading. The effect is that I would get a B+ or an A- for having a couple typos, but someone who can barely spell or formulate a complete sentence might get the same grade as me or even better.

            And if I get an A in the class or on a test I have to keep it a secret or all my classmates will hate me and claim it was because of white supremacy or some shit.

            • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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              I’m going to a community college in California right now and that doesn’t match my experience at all. These were announced grading policies?

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                More like undercurrents in the student body that professors had to be aware to avoid being slandered on exit surveys and ratemyprofessor

                • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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                  Weird, do you feel like sharing generally where this is? I’ve corrected grammar in my English writing classes plenty of times as part of peer review, even (gently) corrected another student on how they were using a racially insensitive term, despite the fact I’m white and they weren’t without it being an issue (they were an international student and we had been reading some stuff from the 1800s that used outdated terms).

                  For other classes I’ve had a mix of whether or not the professors care about grammar, but those that do have always been upfront about how to get in contact with free tutors on campus to check your work.

                  RMP is a crapshoot anyway on how useful it is; one terrible prof at my school is constantly leaving really obvious 5 star reviews for himself to override the hordes of people going DO NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS CLASS!!, while a fantastic professor I have has close to the same middling rating because she does a class that qualifies for fulfilling a gen ed requirement, and people who are uninterested in it just don’t like the class.

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        Unless you’re in college for STEM, every degree is just a piece of paper with very little educational value behind it. You start learning after the degree, once you get the job that you need the degree to get.

        • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          Even STEM bachelor’s degrees can be a little iffy. I finished my undergrad and felt like what I truly learned was how little I knew.

          • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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            The thing about a college education is that you absorb a lot of information that you don’t really think about.

            I’m no smarter than I was in high school, but I know a fuckton more. I just can’t itemize what it is I’ve learned.

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        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.

    • fahfahfahfah@lemmy.billiam.net
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      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

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      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.

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        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.

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      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.

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        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.

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          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.

      • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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        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.

    • The only proper use i found for AI is making small interactive quiz of something i’m trying to memorise. I’ve seen college/uni classes and chatgpt is everywhere. I had quite a few moment of reckoning witht that fact that this is the norm.

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        I was using Notability and it let me have a preview of that, and I tried it on a ~40+ page reading I had for class. I feel like it worked well at picking out trivia (‘what is the definition of x’, ‘who did this thing’, etc), but it felt pretty shallow. If you’re preparing for a multiple choice quiz or refamiliarizing yourself with something then I’d say it’s probably okay, but if you’re studying for the essay portion of a test it’s not enough.

        • Absolutely, and the essay portion of any uni course is not even feasable for the average llm user, if they abuse that. And if I had to do this side study with every thing i do i’d go mental.

    • glimse@lemmy.world
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      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

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    Can we get some citations besides an image someone posted? I did a cursory look and couldn’t substantiate any of this. The only real news is Nvidia saying their last round of investments in openAI and Anthropic would probably be their last.

    Genuine question. I know it’s fun to hate on AI slop and openAI in general, but there are enough real facts, don’t feel like we need any made up ones to win folks over

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        Thank you for at least finding an article. I sadly have to agree that this is an op-ed piece and that it does differ a bit from the picture.

        Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go and cancel your subscription. I personally just don’t feel that we need to resort to exaggerated or false claims. Actual, verifiable facts are pretty damning on their own, the donations and super pacs alone are enough reasons to justify boycotting them. That doesn’t even include their defense contracts or ICE contracts. Heck, the environmental impact and the impact on consumer goods’ prices are enough on their own.

        But we don’t need to make stuff up or spin it in a way to exaggerate a message to support an agenda. We get enough of that shit from AI slop articles making news up as it is.

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        That article is an opinion piece, which is stated at the top. Then if you follow the link to what Sam Altman said

        Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘screwed up’ the writing quality on ChatGPT 5.2 – and promises future versions won’t ‘neglect’ it.

        So right there we have some exaggeration or misinterpretation. This place is being like r/conservative where anything goes as long as it fits our ideals and I’m not down for that.

        I’m not defending OpenAI. Im defending that we don’t spread misinformation. Plenty of actual shit as the other person said.

    • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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      I’d say the news that they lost their biggest source of financing is more than enough.

  • orioler25@lemmy.world
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    It is kinda concerning how few people actually remember the 2008 Recession and what precedent the US state solidified in its response. A key feature of neoliberal politics is the extraction of public capital through state subsidies and cronyist deal-making. These companies understand that bailouts are a genuine and secure route for capital injection should they sustain a consistent loss. Y’all think it’s a coincidence all this coverage of AI company losses followed their realization that there is no way for the US to build up its infrastructure to effectively challenge Chinese AI capabilities?

    This is the business model, it’s why they’re so open and vocal about AI sucking even though they depend on its speculative value and its why they’ve spent so much on collecting liquidation assets in hardware and real-estate despite the obvious inability to meet the infrastructure demands.

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      Oh I remember 2008 quite. I lost most of my teenage years to homelessness because economies collapsed due to America’s capitalist bullshit.

      During that time I had to struggle for food, had junkies threaten and attack my family, and nearly died shitting and puking blood due to contaminated water.

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        Right, you’d think that experience would make you more receptive to the suffering of others, but here you are.

        For context, this person was defending the use of trans slurs recently because they didn’t like that they’d have to call their porn that fetishizes trans women a different word. You’re against capitalism, but apparently dont see a connection between it and its constructions of gender, sexuality, and systemic oppression.

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          Did you cyber-stalk a guy to shame him publicly for his porn preferences? What the fuck is wrong with you?

          • orioler25@lemmy.world
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            1. If your “preference” is bigotry, you get what’s comin to you.

            2. This person harassed me previously because they didn’t like that gooning wasn’t more important than real life.

            I don’t know why chuds think that nobody else can see their gaslighting language.

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              You’re upset people are attracted to trans people. Bro, something is wrong with you.

              Why are you having arguments online about peoples porn habits?!? GO OUTSIDE.

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          “Defending the use of trans slurs”

          He’s talking about “futanari”, a genre name.

          I empathise with problems that are real. Not problems that exist because people want to find problems with something that isn’t. I hate people like that, because the kinds of people who would turn something like that into a problem are the kind who don’t know what problems are.

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      I don’t think you can really bail OpenAI out tho. The bailout worked in 2008 because the government could just buy the 700 billion of “toxic assets” and the financial institutions would return to a self-sustaining state of affairs, like they had been before making a bunch of really risky bets on mortgages. If you gave OpenAI 700 billion they would burn it at an unfathomable rate and still lose money because their underlying business model isn’t functional - they only lose money. OpenAI is the toxic asset here. A bailout of them would be more like if the government had paid all of the delinquent home-owners’ mortgages for one month; Next month they would be unable to pay again.

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        I think you misunderstand my point, I don’t care about the financialized rationalities over these decisions. You just reiterated what I’ve said above as though you said something different, these companies are aware that the US state is willing to absorb the cost of their failed investments through the use of public capital. Whether or not there’s some contrived reasoning for that decision is irrelevant to me and barely of interest to the people who would request bailouts. '08 was also nearly twenty years ago, and the performance behind neoliberal extraction from public funds is not even thinly veiled anymore.

        It was also funny to read the section here that suggest that it would be ridiculous to consider socialized housing in response to a financial crisis caused by privatized housing almost exclusively. I don’t think the comparison makes much sense, since OpenAI also does not benefit workers materially in the way that y’know, shelter does. I get you’re trying to suggest that it is short-sighted, but it ends up demonstrating just how much of a precedent there is in the US of prioritizing corporate interests over the material interests of taxpayers.

        • PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world
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          I mean, for clarity, I’d be here for socialized housing. My point is more that paying one month of mortgage (in this scenario) would not materially change anyone’s situation with the whole “can’t afford the mortgage” thing. It just happened to be a good metaphor.

          My point is more that, I hear a lot of people talking about bailing out OpenAI, and I would just like for people to stop and realize that the situation is different and a (one time) bailout isn’t an option. The government would have to continuously subsidize them.