As a historian, I’ve studied the major consumer boycotts of history. We can take down ChatGPT and send a powerful signal to Silicon Valley, says author and historian Rutger Bregman
This is such a bleak time for tech enthusiasts.
It really feels like every single major tech company is making either absolutely moronic or completely evil choices
You are just stuck choosing between different flavors of shit
It sucks even more to be a tech worker, your job is constantly threatened by automation, but you also hate working for an evil company that does not care about you, but good luck finding a non evil company that pays 6 figures
Or both
Often both
Don’t stop at chatgpt. Cancel any subscription you have! Stop using any big corporation you can!
Internet subscription canceled! See you on the other side brother
Pirate the internet! Hack the planet! DDOS the universe!
I wish it was possible, Imagine mixing meshtastic with tcp/ip. it would be as slow as mid 90s, but forums/text based internet that doesn’t rely on anything but communal decentralized infrastructure?
Reject Reality and substitute it with your own!
I’d be all in on community driven networks if one existed around here. Perhaps I need to start…
“Oh ya here’s the community Plex server. Heres our community forum.”
Etc.
I’m imagining at some point a fediverse of small community owned networks.
You can borrow mine homie thank you for your service
A brain ship will be the last subscription you‘ll need before leaving your mortal shell behind to enter the hive mind of the web where our souls are merged.
Or something along those lines.
There is nothing on the other side. Only blackness.
Cancel ALL your -tions! Benedictions, Predelictions, Prescriptions, Conniptions, Convictions!
I think it’s optimistic to think they would even care about a boycott now. By volunteering to cross the lines that Anthropic wouldn’t cross, they’ve achieved Military Industrial Complex status. It doesn’t matter if you don’t pay for a subscription, you’ll fund them with your tax dollars whether you want to or not. Their mass surveillance tools are too valuable to let them fail, so they’ll get propped up and bailed out no matter what.
Not all GPT users are American/residing in America
That is assuming OpenAI‘s tools are actually that powerful and useful or that Altman can keep convincing the US government they are. I would say it‘s still a very fragile enterprise.
I still wouldn‘t bet against the AI market anymore. Because even though the bubble must burst eventually the US government would intervene. There is no free market, just oligarchs enriching themselves all the way to he top.
This has been discussed on here many times. Barely anyone pays for LLMs. Only companies, corporations, and a few content creators do pay. Your common folk overwhelming majority does not.
And of those that do, I’m sure there’s large corporate contracts, negotiated with OpenAI and not going anywhere. Which is why they tell you how many paid subscribers they have, not how many contracts and then individuals.
The US government subscriptions would account for maybe 1 or 2 million paid users alone, and that might not include Palantir’s use of OpenAI models in their systems which then get contracted out.
This random website claims 44,780 companies reporting using ChatGPT. So entire small companies of 5-10 people might be using it, and then a thousand people at larger companies, that might get you to 10 million users right there.
And keep in mind that Anthropic is just as pro-war and morally bankrupt as OpenAI; the only difference is they didn’t donate as much to the Trump coffers.
and also not Musk’s Grok and not Google’s Gemini and of course not the Chinese DeepSeek so what do we use then?
Preferably just our brains, but if not that, then perhaps somebody running an open model. DuckDuckGo and Proton both have “their own” options, and people with good enough hardware can run something locally too.
I know duckduckgo rely on Microsoft bing for search results so I was assuming the AI is from ChatGPT?
I just looked now at their chatbot and they offer dififerent options most are based on OpenAI’s GPT (which even if self hosted, still relying on OpenAI). one other option based on Meta’s Llama and Calude.
Only reasonable option seems to be Mistral Small 3 which /u/horseloaf seem to suggest as well.
I’ll give it a try
Mistral.ai Le Chat has the appearance of being more responsible and is offering open source models. I’m making no claims on their behalf, though.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try
I don’t have any experience with them yet, but I was looking at a kagi search subscription and that comes with AI usage from different models. Could be an option?
Bregman is a treasure. Very based analysis of societal problems and actually doing shit instead of only observing.
Yes, and he’s such a great communicator as well. In those few paragraphs he packs arguments to convince people ranging from idealist liberals to cynical leftists.
People actually pay for ChatGPT? I am completely out of the loop lol. Maybe thats a good thing.
Every penny given to a US company is bankrolling their government through taxes, and thus funding authoritarianism.
OpenAI has direct government contracts sure, but yeah.
I agree it sucks.
That’s why I’m telling myself that my unemployment is a heroic assault on fascism.
All US big tech feudal lords are helping the Fascist US regime. Even Antrophic. Boycott them all…
Don’t pay for it. But use it. A lot.
GPUs are very expensive, so if you have them generating (for free) short stories of happy little kittens riding the subway in Manhattan or whatever, you are costing them a lot of money. Just don’t give them any data.
This is the way
Cancelled 2 days ago. Feel terrible for not doing it sooner.
You’ll be glad you quit when you did. ChatGPT is rotting people’s brains.
Just out of curiosity: what value did you get from a subscription that made it worth it before?
Spoiler: All Americans that pay taxes are bankrolling authoritarianism. People who buy items from America are bankrolling authoritarianism.
Are all you Americans going to stop paying taxes?
They haven’t used their 2nd amendment yet, so I doubt it.
I did
You guys can afford subscriptions? I just make it toil for no reason because I’m a real capitalist
I did my part this morning because fuck Sam Altman
I recommend moving over to Mistral.
A European, non-fascist option.Bankrolled by Andreessen-Horowitz three times (2023, 2024, 2025), might depend on your definition of fascism.
According to billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen, AI is good, fascists are saints, and anyone who stops rich people like him from funding, deploying, and doing whatever they want with tech is a literal murderer.
I made a similar comment on this thread but I’m back-tracking now I’ve read about Marc Andreessen.
Back tracking or side stepping?
What are you moving to?I just don’t know now…
