I think many readers here are familiar with the coined term "enshittification" which describes a common life cycle of tech products where they eventually are modified to prioritize shareholders instead of their users. It has happened to software like Docker Desktop, Reddit, etc. where a few years go by and everyone is using the software and then, when the ostensible vendor lock-in is at a peak, the shareholders decide the product will be hard for customers to divest from and they want to commercialize the lock-in by charging for what was previously free. If that happens to ChatGPT, now that many content creators are legally protecting their content from becoming training data, would there be any viable free or low cost alternatives?

I have a question that comes at this from the other end: What kind of LLM or 'AI' would content creators intentionally allow access to their content?

I think this question is important because it gives the decision back to content creators, and that's where I think it should be, as a point of principle.

The alternative - and this is what I think will happen - is that LLM scrapers will just start to ignore the instructions to go away once it becomes clear that no content creators want their work to be scraped for nothing in return. So 'AI' users will continue to get free stuff, but at the expense of everyone they stole from.

Open-source/open-weight models have been getting better and better. I don't think I would start a business which relied entirely on ChatGPT (starting a business based on somebody elses platform is always going to be a high-risk choice) but for people including it in their business I don't think the risk for ChatGPT is higher than for any other vendor.

ChatGPT free was always just a demo. Plus carries significant features - plugins, a much more powerful model. The code interpreter is well worth $20/month for certain groups.

The API is the other part of the funnel. It's been quite revenue generating from the beginning. Enshittification is more likely to happen to companies with terrible ARPU, like Reddit or X.

Then again Sam Altman was on Reddit board, and during that time, defended that it was fine for Reddit to lose money, because they still had plenty of money in the bank.

I assume: Cool stuff for free usually starts having some kind of cost suddenly, and people are usually surprised when it happens?

ChatGPT API is not free.