Ask Paul: April 5 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Well, it’s another monster edition of Ask Paul, so buckle up: It’s time to kick off the weekend.
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will asks:

Right now AI is considered in many ways a paid add-on for most services from Microsoft and Google. However, there are some services that are starting to provide AI features at no additional cost such as Zoom (if you have the paid version). Do you think it is possible that AI functions will be “baked in” to products in the future and there would not be an up charge for AI if more services and products include a basic AI level? I mean if it is “good enough” will it be harder for Microsoft to justify a $20-$30 per month service in the long run?

I was just thinking along these lines because of a rumor that Google is considering charging for AI search. But this raises all kinds of questions. Here’s what I’m thinking now. This type of thing will evolve rapidly (along with everything else related to AI).

To your “good enough” comment, I recently (re)told the story about me download Slackware Linux floppy disk images, one by one, using a computer at the community college I then attended and worked at (they had a T1 connection, which was very fast for the day). But the real point of that story is that it introduced my brain to this notion of “good enough”: What if Linux with some free office productivity suite was good enough to supplant Windows and Office? I had the idea that if some organization could somehow deliver on just the 10 percent most-used/most useful parts of Office, it could be lights out.

That never happened, of course, and today, Linux use on the desktop remains tiny. But as I discovered recently, the free office suites that came out of that era, like LibreOffice, are, in fact, quite good. And there is a news story today that a state in Germany—it’s always Germany, they’ll never learn—has adopted Linux and LibreOffice and will reduce its reliance on proprietary software. This feels like a fight from another era, not to mention a broken record, but it’s fair to say that many people could use this combination quite successfully. And so that idea of almost 30 years ago remains. For many, good enough is, well, good enough.

Yesterday, I pulled the trigger on something I had expected to do by mid-February at the latest and signed up for ChatGPT Plus. Like Copilot Pro, it’s $20 per user per month, and the paid version supports custom GPTs, editing DALL-E images, and other features. I was surprised by how good Copilot Pro was, so I’ve kind of stuck with that. But for whatever reason I finally took a look.

And I have to say, the custom GPT stuff for image creation is pretty terrible. Universally terrible, really: I haven’t created an acceptable image with it yet, and while the things it purports to do are more advanced than what I’ve tried with Copilot/Designer—upload a photo and turn it into a Pixar-type cartoon, etc.—it was disappointing. And that�...