cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/38083497
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers Uber's chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token costs, according to The Information.
Lol. Lmao even
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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At least with human labour companies have control. They withhold raises and bat down wages and the people tend to have to take it.
With AI you get suckered in and all of a sudden have a subscription or something similar. Then next year the costs go up. You've already tailored your workflow to use AI, you can't just not pay the higher bill. Next year, costs go up again. What are you going to do? Not pay your bill and lose your entire workforce all at once? Now the company is being held hostage by the AI companies.
For anyone who has worked for a large company that was around for the IBM mainframe days, it's hilarious watching them try to remove the mainframe from their tech stack, while simultaneously becoming dependent on AI.
Any service you depend on in the modern world, you need to be asking yourself 'what will I do when this enshitifies itself'. And it is a when.
Short termism on all sides is destroying our society.
Tbf, open source software is significantly more resistant to enchittification
Tbh, this is just SaaS in general
Workers can and should do this too.
Union strong, babbyyy
Of course they are too dumb to expect this outcome, but it's so fucking obvious this would happen. OpenAI is still burning billions each years, just wait and see how much it will cost when they need to make a profit. (They have already cut down on the free version)
I mean, it's the same freaking market strategy that's been used for over a decade in tech and nobody seems to realize they're inside a slowly boiling water..