Ask Paul: October 3 ⭐

Happy Friday! I’m still getting back up to speed after a month of travel, and I will never really catch up. Not helping matters, this was a surprisingly momentous week. And so it’s not surprising that we’re all struggling with some of the same issues. I feel like this is just the beginning, but you have to start somewhere.
? Where I stand on AI
jrzoomer asks:

Paul I remember reading back to your article I Will not pay for AI last year, was curious to know has your stance changed? Do you subscribe to any of the Google Gemini AI plans or Chat GPT Plus etc today?

One of my favorite series of movies is The Trip, which is basically two British actor/comedians, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, driving around Europe, doing imitations, cracking jokes, and riffing off each other. In one scene in the second in the series, Brydon asks the other, “Where do you stand on Michael Bublé?” And Coogan answers, “His windpipe?”

Which is how I feel about where I stand on AI, I guess.

I wrote about this a bit in Microsoft 365 Puts Copilot Inside the Apps⭐, but the problem I’ve had with Copilot—by which I mean Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Pro—is that these things are overly expensive add-ons to existing subscriptions and the functionality they offer is collectively the type of thing Microsoft historically provided “for free” as part of the subscription. This may seem like a vague distinction, but to me this is an important point about the value of something you pay for. I will pay for “productivity” in the form of Microsoft 365 because I value the online storage, the desktop apps, and whatever else. But those Copilot features are just features of each app, like spell checking or whatever.

But that’s Microsoft 365, or Office, or whatever you want to call it. I do pay for something called LanguageTool, which is similar to Grammarly, meaning that it is a standalone spelling and grammar-checking service that’s maybe better described as a writing aid. LanguageTool and Grammarly both use AI, I’m sure (the latter explicitly), so I’m a hypocrite of a kind. But I pay for that because I don’t use Word to write, I use a Markdown editor that has a very basic spell checker and not much else. So I view LanguageTool as a productivity solution that I see value in and pay for, and in that way it’s like Microsoft 365, not Copilot.

To your question, I have Google AI Pro for one year as part of owning (really borrowing, this year) a Pixel 10 series phone. I got Perplexity Pro for free for one year by signing up for it through the Galaxy Store (as opposed to the Play Store) when someone tipped me off that this worked. And I have Microsoft 365 Family, and as the account holder, I have access to whatever Copilot features that has.

Here’s the thing. I don’t use these things, almost ever. I use Microsoft Designer for some site images, but I think that would just be free regardless of my subscription. I use GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, but the free version. I...