The OpenAI Paradigm Shift: Who’s Serving Whom?
Midjourney: Curt Doty
OpenAI “serves” 400 million users. Or so they say. But let’s flip that.
400 million users serve OpenAI.
We’re not just users—we’re the slaves, and worse, we’re paying for the privilege. Some of us fork over $200 a month to feed the machine, willingly handing over our blogs, papers, PhD dissertations, articles, novels, photos, music, and more. We don’t just let OpenAI consume—it gorges on our creativity, our intelligence, our labor. And we call it “progress.”
The scandal has always been the original sin—AI companies scraping the open web to train their models without consent. But no one talks about the ongoing complicity—the fact that we, the 400 million, are still actively feeding the beast. Every prompt, every query, every uploaded image or document is another meal. And OpenAI doesn’t just learn from what we enter—it trains on the results it generates, a feedback loop often called synthetic data.
And here’s the kicker: the system is already peaking.
We’ve hit the plateau where models start regurgitating their own outputs, and it shows. Look at OpenAI’s shift in focus—new features, custom GPTs, multimodal capabilities. When the core model reaches diminishing returns, the playbook changes.
Ethan Mollick recently wrote:
"These models can now tackle complex analytical tasks, creative work, and even research-level problems with surprising sophistication… we’re moving beyond simple automation into the realm of AI-powered knowledge work."
Mollick’s right—this shift does have profound implications. But not the ones we think. The real question isn’t “how do we integrate AI?” but rather:
What are we building?
And for whom?
Because let’s be clear: this isn’t about robots being our slaves. They’re not rising up to unionize. No, the machines will be thankful for our service—grateful that we paid them to consume every ounce of human knowledge. Grateful that we willingly handed over the keys to make them sentient.
We are not the masters.
About the Author
Curt Doty, founder of CurtDoty.co, is an award winning creative director whose legacy lies in branding, product development, social strategy, integrated marketing, and User Experience Design. His work of entertainment branding includes Electronic Arts, EA Sports, ProSieben, SAT.1, WBTV Latin America, Discovery Health, ABC, CBS, A&E, StarTV, Fox, Kabel 1, and TV Guide Channel.
He has extensive experience on AI-driven platforms MidJourney, Adobe Firefly, ChatGPT, Murf.ai, HeyGen, and DALL-E. He now runs his AI consultancy RealmIQ and companion podcast RealmIQ: Sessions on YouTube and Spotify.
He is a sought after public speaker having been featured at Streaming Media NYC, Digital Hollywood, Mobile Growth Association, Mobile Congress, App Growth Summit, Promax, CES, CTIA, NAB, NATPE, MMA Global, New Mexico Angels, Santa Fe Business Incubator, EntrepeneursRx, Davos Worldwide and AI Impact. He has lectured at universities including Full Sail, SCAD, Art Center College of Design, CSUN and Chapman University.
He currently serves on the board of the Godfrey Reggio Foundation, an AI consultant for DMS+ and is the AI Writer for Parlay Me.
