this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
553 points (99.3% liked)
Fuck AI
6174 readers
2331 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why would I ever even have bought a ChatGPT subscription when there were free ways to access LLMs that were just as good?
I have a gpu, I downloaded some models, played a little, got bored very fast.
Yeah, it's a fun toy that's definitely not worth any money (at present, possibly forever).
In all fairness, recently duck.ai has been adding a "settings" portion to help you prompt the LLM to get much better results, but again, that costs $0 to use. The couple times I've used its "tech support" setting, it's been fairly helpful, but I wouldn't trust it on anything serious (due to how often LLMs hallucinate).
There are uses for it. The problem is that it's easily misused to do the thinking.
I've tried it a few times for help with technical tasks just outside of my knowledge. It was most useful when giving me bad ideas that I argued against and, in the process, figured out better solutions.
Even with ChatGPT, when I wanted to play around with it, it was always free. I was never asked to pay for anything and never saw a reason to seek out a way to pay for it.
If I remember correctly the first time I looked at the marketing materials when I went to their official website and they advertised it to me as an alternative for the free version I was trying, they basically offer(ed) a few features I didn't care about:
The very latest model, i.e. this week instead of this year
Saving your conversations and using that to tailor the LLM to you
The first was not worth $10/month or whatever it was, and the second was something I actively did not want.
I have a sneaking suspicion that people value the service for its ability to mimic professional human writing, which they are otherwise incapable of, and they don't really care that it's not very accurate.
But it's hard for people to admit, "Yes, I'm an adult who writes at a 3rd grade level," so they pretend it's useful for other reasons.