Op-Ed: Boycotting ChatGPT Could Actually Work

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman sees OpenAI as a "company that's bankrolling authoritarianism." If you disagree, you can stop reading here. If you're aligned in his view—that, among other things, OpenAI is behind a $125 million lobbying push that is trying to place all AI-related rulemaking in the president's hands—good news: The nascent "QuitGPT" effort, which calls on people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions, is one that can actually work, he writes in an op-ed for the Guardian. That's because it adheres to the two elements of "the most effective consumer boycotts in history ... they are narrow and they are easy."

He writes that we saw it in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, when Black residents zeroed in on one target in the fight against segregation: the city bus system. Their 381-day boycott "broke the bus company financially," and the damage reverberated across transit systems throughout the South.

"OpenAI is our bus company," Bregman argues. Its market share is shrinking, and it's blowing through cash so quickly it has turned to ads. That means it's money-hungry and vulnerable. As such, every cancellation—and there have been more than a million of them—"registers." Better still, giving it up is a much easier proposition than, say, abandoning Facebook or Amazon. You can simply switch to another equally good rival. Read his full argument here.