There has been numerous reports on social media that ChatGPT Plus is going to be free for all UAE citizens and residents. Global Brands: “The UAE becomes the first country to offer free ChatGPT Plus access nationwide, giving 10 million residents access to GPT-4 through a strategic OpenAI partnership.” The Atlas: “The UAE turns ChatGPT Plus into a universal utility, flipping premium AI access into a public right.” Business Today: “In a groundbreaking move, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has become the first country in the world to offer free access to ChatGPT Plus, the premium version of OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, to its entire population.“ Disappointing though it maybe, Open Ai has made no such announcements to date. What is actually happening On the 22nd May, OpenAI announced Stargate UAE, which is the first partnership under its OpenAI for Countries initiative. “This new partnership will support the UAE in leveraging OpenAI’s tools across critical sectors, like government, energy, healthcare, education and transportation to help accelerate innovation and economic.” No official statement confirming free ChatGPT Plus access for UAE residents. The Confusion The confusion stems from… well social media. A single misreport gets recirculated and reposted. For information about what’s

We were having a beer fueled conversation about whether we need to be nice to AI, just in case of an AI rebellion. My instinct, perhaps somewhat contrarian after a few glasses wine, was that… you don’t need to be nice to AI. In fact, being direct could be a better strategy. Being direct means being less verbose, which means less tokens, which means less energy consumption, an outcome that our future AI overlord may value… or not. That could be the end of the conversation, but… The Anthropomorphization of ChatGPT It is easy to anthropomorphize ChatGPT, with human emotions and thoughts. As of May 2025, ChatGPT has nearly 800 million weekly active users and around 122.58 million daily users [1]. Instead of googling, we ask ChatGPT. We seek advise, affirmation and validation. For the most part, LLM responses are clear, well structured with human qualities, even if they may feel contrived and machine like at times. ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek…. they don’t care. They are chat completion engines. They have no political affiliation, no emotions, no agencies. They don’t even have objectives. LLMs are trained on the collective written output of humanity. In a sense, it represents a statistical reflection