I wish ads never existed.
The future is open source, no subscriptions, no purchases, 100% free and community supported.
The sooner software gets to this point, the world will be a much more better place rather than everything being a subscription.
Only a society which doesn't want anything, needs nothing, demands nothing can do without ads. While privacy invading ad tech is obviously a bad thing, ads - namely the thing used to introduce you and others like you to a new idea - is a good thing.
So you want software from people for free, hope you share also your work power with others for free.
I the end someone pays for open source and often it's some developer with his spare time.
Yes to open source, but yes to money for the developers.
ChatGPT is already free to use? What, do you expect them to keep providing this without any return?
Besides, who will pay for the compute of LLMs in your utopian future?
“I want someone to work for me but I don’t want to pay them” is exactly the kind of mindset that led to ads everywhere.