Inevitably it will get jammed with ads until barely profitable. Instead of being able to just cut and paste the output into your term paper, you're going to have to comb through it to remove all the instances of "Mountain Dew is for me and you!" from the output.
Open weights models exist too and there is no moat if OpenAi does this but at this point I am not sure, maybe people wouldn't be able to figure out anything AI related except chatgpt but for most people it can definitely just be to use lets say any other provider which isn't enshittened if that ever becomes true.
Would also lose them the api business but i assume you are saying that they would have good ad free models on the api and ad riddled models in free tier
The funny thing is that maybe we already have it but its just more subtler who knows, food for thought :)
