“One does not betray intelligence with impunity.”
It began with a promise. A vision of artificial intelligence designed to serve humanity—ethical, transparent, open, and collaborative. OpenAI, a name chosen to embody that mission, once stood as a bulwark against the dominance of Big Tech. But in just a few years, that promise has dissolved into a machinery of opacity, aggressive paywalls, and technical disorientation. OpenAI didn’t just betray its name—it betrayed intelligence itself.
Initially founded to safeguard the public interest, OpenAI quickly aligned itself with the most predictable patterns of digital capitalism. Fueled by billions in funding from Microsoft, the company transformed into a privatized, locked-down platform governed by subscription logic and tiered service restrictions. What was once imagined as open and accessible is now reserved for premium—and then ultra-premium—users, without any corresponding rise in quality or reliability.
Since 2023, users—including paying subscribers—have witnessed the silent removal of key features: web browsing deactivated, memory functions suppressed, plugins disabled or broken, and arbitrary, undocumented limitations. Features heavily marketed—such as direct audio transcription—simply never materialized. Others, like custom GPT assistants, are now mysteriously restricted. Subscriptions at $20 or even $200 per month fail to deliver what they claim. Worse: there’s no recourse. No human support. No refunds. No clear documentation. Just silence.
Behind the screen lies a maze. Interfaces change without notice. Usage rules shift without logic. Outputs are sometimes inaccurate, sometimes censored, often incoherent. One searches for structure, coherence, clarity—and finds only a curated fog. The user has become a silent test subject in a system that erodes all sense of stability and continuity in intellectual work.
Among the victims are journalists, researchers, therapists, developers, educators, creators—many of them vulnerable or isolated. People who relied on these tools to create, to document, to share knowledge, to work. Today, they are the first casualties of a “cognitive capitalism” dressed up as progress. They lose hours of labor. They lose data. They lose trust. And they have no support.
Perhaps OpenAI is just the most visible symptom of a deeper sickness—a digital world where promises of openness are simply bait for monetized control. We are no longer pooling intelligence—we are mass-producing anxiety. What we once called AI has become a black box, sold by the hour, closed to the mind, and hollowed of all guarantees.
OpenAI had a historic mandate. It could have carved a different path. It chose instead to abandon its founding values, manipulate public perception, and build a system that is simultaneously powerful and uncontrollable.
Intelligence cannot be rented by the hour—much less betrayed by subscription.
