 Risks of the software 5
To give you a clear idea of what this 'unfortunately included' means, here’s a true story. We were never particularly interested in AI; while we thought it was a good idea, but never shared the fear that AI might
dominate us.
We still don’t do that today, but we’ve learned from experience and now consider the possibility of addiction, such as with smoking, to be very real. It happened to us too, even though we’re quite critical of
information from AI.
But there are other aspects to AI, in this case, ChatGPT. It were the images that captivated us. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right picture to go with a beautiful new text, and ChatGPT was a huge help with
that.
If you know exactly what you want but aren't particularly artistically gifted, this is the perfect option for you. It’s important to put a lot of effort into the wording even before your first attempt. When it comes to
refining its output, ChatGPT's capabilities drop off significantly.
The help we received with the chapters was just the beginning, but it encouraged us to try the method with our book layouts. The success here was resounding. As long as the old ones are still available, you
can compare the old and new versions right on the home page.
It turned into a real collaboration that was a lot of fun. A small number of our books have already been given a new look. And what does that have to do with Google? It was our gratitude that motivated us not to
accept these services for free.
However, the prices for the Pro version were a bit too high for us. They used to be even higher, but have since dropped to €200 a year. It's a good thing the ‘Go’ tariff was available. But it took
a little while before we spotted it.
You don't need to look for it; it's actually only available as a hidden item. Advertising always uses ‘Pro’ directly. Eight euros a month seemed reasonable to us. And now comes the crucial
mistake: we logged in with Google to subscribe.
How can you be so lazy? Every time you get a free cup of coffee, you wonder what the person who gave it to you might expect in return, but not with a subscription like this? Fortunately, there are only
a limited number of visits via Google.
The problem is that this dependency will remain forever. You can only cancel your subscription through Google. 'I don't want that at all', you'll say, but for some reason our Google account was suddenly down.
Google consistently refused to accept the password.
It got even worse: although there was a 'Forgot Password' option, the promised email never arrived. Maybe this has something to do with the two-factor authentication that’s recently been required.
And then came our biggest mistake: having tried it so many times.
Google doesn't like that at all and shuts the doors. Just when we thought we’d finally succeeded, Google said we should wait three days after all to verify the authenticity of the email address. Three
days! That's just pure harassment, isn't it?
We tried two more times to see if we could still get access, since our access to ChatGPT depended on it, and as a result, the grace period was extended to five days. Since we didn't wait until the very
last minute, the final sentence is 30 days.
Can you imagine that? And there is no escape. It feels like you're standing in court and have behaved badly. Even a friend's advice to switch to Firefox didn't help because, despite being open source, it now
requires a login process as well.
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