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Comment by egeozcan | Hacker News Reader

Worries of AI going rogue take so much attention that no governance body seems to care about the shady subscriptions and limits business.

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What about those do you think are "shady"? Price discrimination in favor of small customers at the expense of large customers is somewhat common; businesses want customers to buy more of their products, but customers are not obliged to buy more if they like their current deals. Having limits on using finite resources seems even easier to justify.

Humans see differences in prices as unfair. The greatest example of this is price gouging during an emergency, but also look at the level of hate that scalpers get.

Using AI to do this, if anything, given the common negative sentiment, is seen as even worse. People think of this as AI using information asymetry to squeeze more out of users, not to cut people a deal.

Taking advantage of information asymmetry is generally looked down upon as well. Look at all the laws we have protecting kids from this. Businesses often don't seem similar protections because those are businesses with big legal teams (and when it is a big legal team vs a small mom and pop store without a single lawyer on payroll, people do start taking issues with it). The power difference between the average company using AI pricing and the average consumer falls pretty solidly in the 'we don't accept this' side of taking advantage of information asymmetry.

I could keep going, but I think these are already plenty enough reasons to why people look at AI price discrimination as not just a bad business practice they don't like, but an immoral/unethical one.

Sure, one can make economical counter arguments, but that's arguing on an orthogonal dimension that simply isn't relevant to where these feelings/thoughts come from.

Do you think AI subscriptions are analogous to either price gouging during an emergency or ticket scalping? I don't see the similarities.

It is fair to complain that subscription AI usage limits are opaque, but that is at best tangentially related to them being subsidized relative to API prices.

Shady as in not clearly communicated and change with random tweets being the only indicator, or a blog post if you're lucky.

x20? 25x? 5x? All in comparison to some other plan that also doesn't have clear limits. "Oh BTW we mean session limits, your weekly is 2x of 5x". "This model eats your limits twice as fast and you can use half of your weekly limits on it". "No this time we mean weekly only".

You can avoid all of this by just using the API.

Couponers have to work extra to find and maintain a good deal.

That doesn't resolve them from providing a stable service for something they market. I'm not buying something under the counter, and it's not advertised to be an alternative for people not willing to pay the full price. From my perspective, the subscription is the full price and I expect stable, reliable service.

The customer is always right.

You say that when the customer makes irrational requests.

Is it irrational to want consent went the subscription terms change? Netflix does it a month in advance, and cancels the plan when no consent given. What do you think is special with LLM companies so they get special treatment?

I'm from Europe so maybe this is why it feels so weird to me. Then again, they could stop offering their services to a region if they don't want to adjust their ways.

What gets me confused is how they aren't prosecuted for this. My theory is that people are too busy with the security threats and (currently) ignore the shady practices.

Do you mean the subsidized subscriptions which allow individuals to pay a tenth of the normal API cost for tokens?

Dumping is shady af.

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