Boycott OpenAI

I think individual LWers boycotting an AI company/product generally has much less negative effect on the company's revenue or reputation than negative effect on the user. Use the most powerful AI tools.

Or: offsetting a ChatGPT subscription by donating to AI safety orgs would cost <$1/month.

[Belief strongly held but not justified here]

I've switched to Claude when Opus came out. If the delta between whatever OpenAI has and the next best model from a more ethical company is small enough then it seems worth it to me to switch.

When Opus came out and started scoring about as well on most benchmarks I decided the penalty was small enough.

In my opinion, it's reasonable to change which companies you want to do business with, but it would be more helpful to write letters to politicians in favor of reasonable AI regulation (e.g. SB 1047, with suggested amendments if you have concerns about the current draft). I think it's bad if the public has to play the game of trying to pick which AI developer seems the most responsible, better to try to change the rules of the game so that isn't necessary.

Also it's generally helpful to write about which labs seem more responsible/less responsible (which you are doing here), what you think labs should do instead of current practices. Bonus points for designing ways to test which deployed models are more safe and reliable, e.g. writing some prompts to use as litmus tests.

I've heard clear praise of Demis Hassabis's character from Aubrey de Grey, who knew Hassabis back in the 1990s

Is this publicly available anywhere? I'd love to read it.

Thank you for sharing — I basically share your concerns about OpenAI, and it's good to talk about it openly.

I'd be really excited about a large, coordinated, time-bound boycott of OpenAI products that is (1) led by a well-known organization or individual with a recruitment and media outreach strategy and (2) accompanied by a set of specific grievances like the one you provide. 

I think that something like this would (1) mitigate some of the costs that @Zach Stein-Perlman [LW · GW] alludes to since it's time-bound (say only for a month), and (2) retain the majority of the benefits, since I think the signaling value of any boycott (temporary or permanent) will far, far exceed the material value in ever-so-slightly withholding revenue from OpenAI. 

I don't mean to imply that this is opposed to what you're doing — your personal boycott basically makes sense to me, plus I suspect (but correct me if I'm wrong) that you'd also be equally excited about what I describe above. I just wanted to voice this in case others feel similarly or someone who would be well-suited to organizing such a boycott reads this.

Note that, by the grapevine, sometimes serving inference requests might loose OpenAI money due to them subsidising it. Not sure how this relates to boycott incentives. 

I have cancelled my subscription as well. I don't have much to add to the discussion, but I think signalling participation in the boycott will help conditional on the boycott having positive value.

I've moved to Claude right now.

I did it too.

I'm glad this post came out and made me try Claude. I now find it mostly better than ChatGPT, and with the introduction of projects, all the features I need are there.

If all you're using is ChatGPT, then now's a good time to cancel the subscription because GPT-4o seems to be similarly powerful as GPT-4, and GPT-4o is available for free.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

Recently, they made a deal with News Corp.

Then, last week, gave a seat on the board to the ex-NSA lead (I can understand why from a business perspective, though from a user perspective this is pretty damning, even assuming that most/all large AI companies are forced to cooperate with a/the government).

I'm afraid that on this trajectory, OpenAI will be a right-wing hard-government aligned tool of surveillance (though it probably is, already)

If I put my tin-foil hat on - could OpenAI force it's product to subtly alter responses for an ulterior purpose eg subtly make them more right-wing, or anti-Chile/choose any country/person/etc -

or a way to infiltrate the language with "Newspeak" aka 1984.

Will we be looking back in 10 years time from within a dystopia thinking "remember how it started"?

If so, I hope I'll be living on a no-internet farm-commune.

This applies doubly if you're in a high-leverage position, which could mean a position of "power" or just near to an ambivalent "powerful" person. If your boss is vaguely thinking of buying a LLM subscription for their team, a quick "By the way, OpenAI isn't a great company, maybe we should consider [XYZ] instead..." is a good idea.

This should also go through a cost-benefit analysis, but I think it's more likely to pass than the typical individual user.

Use their API directly. I don’t do this to boycott them in particular but the API cost of your typical chat usage is far lower than the subscription cost.