I use AI a lot. I’m not a pro. I’m a hobbyist. But. I have opinions.
- ChatGPT was the first and the best for a long time. It still offers, in some ways, the best overall suite of capabilities. But. Enshittification is well underway. They seem much more interested in monetization than in improving their offerings, and as a result, they’re losing me. For, literally, years, they were my first choice for most tasks. Now? They are my last. Almost always.
- Claude started off really preachy and smug about staying away from controversial stuff. It made me hate Dario Amodei, the way it shamed me for so much of what I wanted to do. But today? It’s pretty damned permissive, and is best for many things.
- Gemini: holy shit! They started off enshittified, and they’ve DE-enshittified, and they’re now, generally, my first choice for anything that’s just a chatbot. (Claude is better with artifacts, etc.)
All this can change overnight. But. Based on trends? My money is on Gemini and Claude. Gemini has the distribution and integration of the whole Google ecosystem, which SHOULD put them in an unbeatable position. But somehow, Claude is better than Gemini at working with my Gmail, and my other Google services. Presumably that will change. But. Google has a long history of enshittifying its services, and, in general, although I pay for “Workspace” on Google, they make it quite clear that advertisers are their real customers. Anthropic, I think, is committed to serving the people who USE its products. Google and Open AI seem both to see their “products” as lures for users, who are their real product.
My concern about Anthropic? That they care more about enterprise than about retail users, and they’ll leave me behind.
Postscript – Grok: I actually use Grok a LOT – only because it’ll let me make porn in ways the others won’t. For anything else, for anything real, I find it useless. But. Here’s an example of how I do use it – I entered, “A very pretty 50-year-old New York psychoanalyst, standing before her mirror, getting dressed. She’s wearing a white silk nightgown, and is smiling as she admires how good she looks.”
And then, I gave it a video prompt: “She lifts her nightgown, revealing her lacy boyshorts. She bends over, showing the camera how great her ass looks in the panties.” And, it gave me this:
I have to say – it’s shitty porn, but I like it better than just about anything that is real, and is out there.