02/21/2026
I recently finished Karen Hao’s Empire of AI and I genuinely don’t know how to go back to using OpenAI’s ChatGPT the same way.
Before the clean interface. Before the GPT-4 upgrade prompt. Before the $20/month felt normal — there were Kenyan workers being paid $1.46 an hour to look at child sexual abuse material, torture videos, and graphic violence all day, so the model could learn what not to say to you. Many of them developed lasting trauma. When they started organizing for better pay, OpenAI ended the contract.
That’s what made it safe for us.
The training data? Copyrighted books scraped from piracy sites. Over a million hours of YouTube content — against their own Terms of Service.
Developer code pulled from GitHub without asking anyone. Writers and coders are suing. The New York Times is suing. None of it is settled. None of it has been cleared.
When Scarlett Johansson said no — twice — to voicing ChatGPT, OpenAI launched a voice so close to hers that her friends couldn’t tell the difference. Altman tweeted the word “her” the same hour. They called it a coincidence.
Employees who tried to leave and speak up were handed paperwork threatening to cancel their vested equity — money they had already earned — if they didn’t sign a lifetime gag order. There was also a clause saying they couldn’t tell anyone the gag order existed. Altman said he didn’t know. His signature on the founding documents was dated a full year before that.
Their own internal safety team warned that GPT-4o was being rushed — given 10 days for evaluations that needed months. The co-head resigned and wrote publicly: “Safety culture has taken a backseat to shiny products.” That team was then quietly dissolved.
Oh — and the nonprofit? The one founded with a promise to never compete with humanity and share everything openly? It’s converting to a for-profit corporation. Investors can make up to 100x returns. The mission statement has been rewritten, without announcement, nearly every year since founding.
Not one of these allegations has been dismissed. Not one lawsuit settled. Everything is ongoing.
Think again who are you paying monthly $20 to.
