First, services like this are really good deals for their users. Free or cheap access to LLMs that cost the companies billions of dollars to run. OpenAI is valued at 160 billion dollars but taking an estimated 5 billion dollar loss because of how expensive it is to run (I moved this out of the paywall for you).this is a weird argument I don't get... it's like saying "Your dog isn't getting free food YOU paid for it" or (it is the week of my birthday) the 3 times I am getting taken out to eat this week isn't "Free food" cause my mom, my sister and my best friend are paying... I will say when/if my wife takes me out that ISN'T free cause our money is Fungible.
So yes, first, they're good to their users. Then, they screw their users for their business partners. Then they screw their business partners for their investors. Then they screw their investors to line their own pockets and run off.
There's a big cost to use an LLM right now – power, water, the non-consensual use of peoples' creative work, the loss of creative jobs, and the exponentially growing piles of slop filling up the internet.
On this last point, people now have to do image searches for time periods before generative AI because image searches are now saturated with crappy AI images. If you thought the internet was already going down hill, now it's in free fall.
So yeah, there's a cost worse than just clicking a website and getting stuff.
Again, you can hear all of that and say "whatever, I don't care". That's your choice to make. But you can't say no one ever told you.