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Comment by corford | Hacker News Reader

If you're unhappy with this, an immediate way to signal it is with your wallet. In my case I've just uninstalled chatgpt from my phone, cancelled my subscription and will up my spend with anthropic.

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Thanks for the reminder. Doing the same now.

The little respect I had left for Sam is now wiped. Makes me sick.

Growing up I always thought AI would be this beautiful tool, this thing that opens the gates to a new society where work becomes optional in a way. But I failed to think about human greed.

I remember following OpenAI way back when it was a non profit explaining how AI uncontrolled could be highly detrimental. Now Sam has not only taken that non profit and made it for-profit. It seems he’s making the most evil decisions he can for a buck.

Cancel your subscription, tell your friends to. And vote to heavily tax these companies and their leaders.

Perfect timing - Had already cancelled my Claude sub over their OAuth ban in external tools and was about to pick up a Codex sub as the next best alternative.

Ended up renewing my Claude sub today instead. Principled stances matter and I no longer trust OpenAI to be trustworthy custodians of my AI History.

Just canceled my subscription! I immediately received an email with the subject “We’d love your feedback on why you canceled your ChatGPT plus subscription” and a link to a survey.

I linked to https://notdivided.org/ as the reasoning why.

I’d like to say I did that but I already canceled my subscription 4 months ago in favor of Claude and Gemini based purely on product quality.

Was shocking back then to think how far we’ve come.

Deleted all chats and deleted my account.

I tried doing that but I'm certain they didn't delete it, because I tried logging in after a week and it worked

Totally agree. Signed up for a claude code account and will not give OpenAI any money in the future. Let's see what Google does. I will definitely vote with my wallet.

I canceled my subscription, wiped my history, closed my account, deleted the app. Using Claude Max.

Thanks for reminding me. Been meaning to cancel for months.

Exactly. Stop using OpenAI. Don’t design it into your software at work. Use Claude. Screw these guys.

Yep I’m pulling the plug on my OIA account on Monday morning and switching to Anthropic.

Same here. Removed my account, deleted the app.

Just deleted OpenAI account, F these guys

Same

Do you honestly believe that cancelling a subscription makes a bit of difference to a company that is either committing accounting fraud on a monumental scale or shoveling venture capital money into a furnace? not to mention the whole collaborating with a fascist government thing.

taking real action is your choice, but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota

edit: to be clear, i'm not advocating for nihilism, but tricking yourself into thinking you made a difference to make yourself feel better isn't the play either

I think you have too much pessimism. It's not guaranteed to work, but as I mentioned in another thread, since around December, Claude (and Gemini to a lesser extent) has had all the buzz in tech circles, while Chat-GPT has seemed like the also-ran. And that matters: decision-makers in companies notice these things and momentum becomes self-reinforcing (you use Claude Code because everyone else uses Claude Code). If a large enough group of developers visibly defects from OpenAI because of this, it definitely could have consequences. It's not a sure thing, but it's far from hopeless.

I was not a Chat-GPT user even before this, but I'm bumping my Claude Code subscription to the next tier up. Fuck OpenAI.

At least I'm not getting my hands dirty.

> but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota

This is blatantly false and intellectually dishonest. Of course it matters. Your edit is also wrong; you are advocating for nihilism with statments like these.

Yes? Earnings matter to investors

Do they? What are those OpenAI earnings that you are talking about? That's a company that should have ceased existing some time ago if earnings were important

Investors want to see growth. If there’s no growth or even a loss in users the next round of funding will be more difficult to secure.

It absolutely matters, especially when done in unison like this.

Cancelling ChatGPT sends a signal that you don't agree with weaponizing AI. Switching to Claude says you support Anthropic's principled stance against it. If you have a strong opinion either way, today is the day to vote with your wallet.

Dismissing every small action as meaningless is just apathy and how nothing ever changes.

Anthropic isn't against weaponizing AI, it's just against two specific carve outs for now. They happily accepted the Pentagon's money so long as it was only spying on other countries. And now that the leopard is eating their face they're claiming the moral high ground.

It's entirely possible for both Anthropic and OpenAI to be in the wrong here. This is a massive publicity win but it doesn't make them heroes in my book.

It sure does but it's hard to get a bigger wallet than public money in the US. I do think it's fundamental as an individual to take a moral stance, even if it's entirely pointless, for one owns psychological well-being but honestly here I believe the whole point is precisely to decouple from the need of consumers who are clearly NOT paying for AI. Relying on income from governments is a smart move.

So yes, do cancel if you were paying for OpenAI. Stop using it entirely even, but don't necessarily expect to slow down their encroachment, sadly.

It's the only thing that matters. These companies don't follow the rules of capitalism physics. They live or die on vibes alone and the tech community abandoning them en masse is bad for the vibes. Once they lose the vibes they are Wiley Coyote looking down at the canyon below.

What has an impact is cancelling a subscription and then talking about it. The media will amplify it the pushback. The goal is to make the name OpenAI and ChatGPT toxic, that whatever you do will be converted into a technology that will surveil or bomb you.

Personally I'm happy about this. OpenAI are being fair about letting the gov use their models to spy on everybody, doesn't seem right that Americans get a pass.

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