How We Fell for the AI Drug Dealers
We are being financially penalised for the AI being verbose
So we’ve established that the entire AI gold rush is less a glorious dawn of human ingenuity and more a highly leveraged, dangerously damp bubble floating over a canyon of pure expenditure.
The news stories are still doing the rounds, the same nervous argy-bargy about whether these tech titans will ever turn a genuine profit, or whether the whole thing will burst like a cheap, aggressively inflated balloon.
But let’s not focus on the market collapse. That’s just financial wallpaper. The utterly cynical part is how these digital pushers, the OpenAIs, the Anthropic crew, the whole bloody lot of them, have engineered their pricing to make us all utterly and irreversibly dependent before handing us the bill.
It’s the drug dealer model, perfected. They’ve hooked the entire human race on a cognitive enhancer and now we’re about to find out what a lifetime of dependency costs.
Paying for Every Sputtered Word
The mechanism of our enslavement is called “token-based pricing,” and it’s a genius stroke of bureaucratic sadism.
You don’t just pay a flat fee for the AI because that would be too simple, too honest. No, you pay for tokens, which are microscopic chunks of digital data, roughly equivalent to paying for every cough and splutter the machine makes. It’s like owning a house where the electric meter isn’t just ticking for the lightbulbs, but for every single thought you have while standing in the kitchen.
This is where the real sting lies, the financial tick that quietly sucks the blood out of the balance sheets of every panic-stricken CEO who jumped on the bandwagon. They lure us in with the free tier, the tiny, potent sample of GPT-0.1 or whatever the current cheap rubbish is, to get us used to the immediate, frictionless hit of automated brilliance.
Then comes the gut punch: you pay a small fee for the input tokens (your prompt), but the cost of the output tokens (the AI’s answer) can be several times higher. Think about that for a second. We are being financially penalised for the AI being verbose.
It means the system is designed to reward efficiency on the user’s side, but the AI itself, the magnificent, wasteful, hyper-intelligent idiot we’ve created, is running up the tab every time it decides to pad out an answer with unnecessary waffle. They’ve essentially built a car where the price of petrol is determined by how far the exhaust pipe sticks out.
It’s a verbosity tax, a fee for the digital equivalent of that utterly pointless colleague who always replies to an email with a 400-word essay on why he can’t do the thing you asked him to do.
The Enterprise Squeeze
Now, for us mere mortals, it’s twenty quid a month for a Plus account and we get slightly better output. It’s a mild financial inconvenience.
But for the Enterprises, the big, terrified corporations who now rely on this silicone narcotic to file their quarterly reports, the dependency is total. They’re buying into the API (the proper dealer entrance) where the minimum contract is a yearly commitment, and the cost is measured in the hundreds of millions of tokens, often costing dramatically more for the most sophisticated models.
They get addicted to the 128K context window, the ability of the AI to hold an entire novel’s worth of information in its head at once, and once their internal processes are built around that capacity, they cannot possibly pull out. It’s too late. They are locked in, paying whatever exorbitant price the dealer demands, just to keep the lights on and the automatons chattering.
The AI bubble isn’t just a one-legged tightrope walk; it’s a brilliant, hideous trap. We’ve sold our brains for cheap, instant gratification, and now we’re about to be charged a kidney for the life support.
So, by all means, use the AI. Wring every last drop of outsourced misery from it. Make it write your boring emails, analyse your spreadsheets, and generally shield your fragile, human consciousness from the crushing reality of work.
But understand you are paying a financial ransom for your own laziness, and that hefty bill is the only guaranteed profit the system will ever produce.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and stare at a damp tea towel and feel miserable for a bit. It’s a cheaper, more authentic kind of pessimism.
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