I’m Using AI For Free, But Someone Is Definitely Paying

In a world where everything has a price, why is artificial intelligence still free? Because you are paying. The bill just does not come in cash.

I woke up this morning, made my coffee, and occupied my brain cells with a single thought: why is ChatGPT free? I mean, really free. It writes emails, fixes code, prepares presentations, gives ideas, finds titles, cleans up texts, and sometimes builds sentences better than the person using it. And it looks like it asks for nothing in return. That bothered me. Because every “free” thing I have ever seen in my life had a calculation behind it. Free app, free social media, free game, free platform, free service. Then one day you realize the free thing was not the service. The free thing was you.

For anyone who wants to see the real calculation behind free digital services in its ugliest form, The Full Ugliness Of The Cambridge Analytica Scandal >> is a good side reading. Because the issue there was simple too: the user was not just using something, the user was being read, measured, and directed.

But this is not a situation that can be dismissed with the tired cliché of “you are the product.” To me, there is a much bigger, much sneakier game here.

I Am Training A Billion-Dollar Model For Free

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. They all have one thing in common: human feedback. Every time I tell the model “wrong, this is the correct version,” every time I react with “you did this better” or “this was terrible,” every retry, every edit, every correction leaves a mark inside the development loop of these systems.

Normally, people get paid for this work. Someone reads the model’s answer, scores it, corrects it, ranks it, comments on it. They get an hourly wage. I, on the other hand, do the same job with the stupid adrenaline of “we found free AI.” Am I cheap labor? Yes. But that is not even the real issue.

A drug dealer gives the first dose for free. First, you get used to it. Then you start feeling like you cannot function without it. Then the tap gets tightened. Then the price appears. Then comes the more expensive package. Then they drag you from door to door with “premium,” “pro,” “team,” “enterprise,” “higher limits,” “smarter model,” “faster answers,” “longer context.”

To me, artificial intelligence is exactly that kind of trap. First it says, “come here, let me make your life easier.” Then it settles into your life. Then it takes over your way of thinking, your working speed, your writing reflex, your decision-making mechanism. And at the end, it turns around and tells you this: if you can live without me, go ahead and try.

That is why another question inevitably comes to mind: if everything depends on the models of a few companies in the cloud, are we really free? I had also scratched the more technical side of that question in Is It Possible To Install Your Own Local AI Assistant On Your PC, And Why Cloud AI Feels So Restricted >>.

The Cost Is Real, But So Is The Illusion

These systems are not free to run. Servers are not free. GPUs are not free. Electricity is not free. Data centers are not free. Engineers are not free. Billions of dollars are not being burned on this for nothing.

Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Meta are not distributing charity to the world. Nobody spends billions just so humanity can write prettier sentences. These companies do not care whether my email sounds better. The goal is to create cognitive dependency.

It writes my emails. It fixes my code. It prepares my presentations. It organizes my writing ideas. Sometimes I even ask it what to eat, what movie to watch, what decision to make. At first, this looks very innocent. You say, “what is the big deal, I am just getting help.” Then one day you realize you have opened the window just to put two sentences together. You have started asking it before thinking about a subject. Instead of debating inside your own head whether an idea is right or wrong, you first look at what the AI says.

This is where the real danger begins. Because the issue is not that AI gives me answers. The issue is that I lose the habit of searching for the answer inside myself. After a while, I do not write, I make it write. I do not think, I make it think. I do not decide, I receive decision suggestions. I do not find my own voice, I mistake the model’s polished sentences for my own intelligence. And without realizing it, I hand over the steering wheel of my own mind to someone else. That is the exact moment when the tap will close.

That is why the issue is not only that artificial intelligence helps me. I had also thought about the wider side of the same line in Big Data And AI May Be Quietly Killing Creativity >>: as data grows, the strange and imperfect creativity of the human being slowly gets pushed to the edge of the system.

Data Runs Out, My Cognitive Process Does Not

High-quality human-made data on the internet is not infinite. Books, articles, forums, blogs, news, comments, archives, texts written by human labor. All of this has been absorbed for years. Scraped. Broken apart. Cut into tiny bites called tokens. Then thrown into the model’s stomach.

But the issue is not just old texts written on the internet. I think the truly valuable thing now is our live thinking process. I ask something. The model answers. I object. It corrects itself. I say, “no, not like that.” It tries again. I explain my style. It gets closer to my style. I set boundaries. It learns those boundaries. It sees what makes me angry, what I like, which sentence I find strong, which answer I throw into the trash.

This is no longer just data. This is the live copying of the way the human mind works. My word choices, my patience, my anger, my way of deciding, my problem-solving method, my writing rhythm, my correction reflex, my threshold for approval, my understanding of quality. All of it touches somewhere inside the system.

The thing they will tell me tomorrow, “you too can be more productive with AI,” is the thing I am strengthening with my own hands today. Do you know what is worse? I think I am being smart while doing it. I say, “look, I am using it for free.” I say, “look, my work got faster.” I say, “look, now I am more productive.” But maybe I am not the productive one. Maybe I am just an interface. A temporary, cheap, excited human interface that the system uses to grow itself.

The Free Thing Is Not The Service, It Is My Dependency

While writing all of this, I could not stop thinking about this: maybe the thing that is truly free is not even the time I spend questioning this system. Maybe the truly free thing is the mental sovereignty I slowly hand over.

Because this system does not just give me answers. It also teaches me how to ask questions. It shapes how I write, how I think, how I research, how I decide. And it does this so smoothly that most of the time I cannot even tell whether this is help or surrender.

Yes, I am using artificial intelligence for free. But someone is definitely paying. Today, it looks like companies are paying. They cover the server cost, they run the model, they build the infrastructure. But in the long run, I think the bill will be sent to me. Not as money, but as something worse. With my attention. With my habits. With my power to decide. With my courage to build my own sentence.

And maybe in the end I will realize this: artificial intelligence was not free. I just understood too late what I was paying with.