> Free might as well be a curse-word to me, and I'm not alone. I'm old enough to have experience in pre-internet era magazines, and the downgrade in quality from paid publications to free ones has been quite substantial.

The cool thing is it is trivial for LLM vendors to leverage this bias as well the pro-free bias other people have to also sell a premium, for-pay offering that, like pre-internet magazines is, despite not being free to the user, still derives the overwhelming majority of its revenue from advertising. Although one of the main reasons advertising-sponsored print media in the pre-internet era often wasn't free is that paid circulation numbers were a powerful selling point for advertisers who didn't have access to the kind of analytics available on the internet; what users were paying for often wasn't the product so much as a mechanism of proving their value to advertisers.