"I believe GPT-5 is part of a larger process happening in generative AI — enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s term for when platforms start out burning money offering an unlimited, unguarded experience to attract their users, then degrade and move features to higher tiers as a means of draining the blood from users.
With the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI has fully committed to enshittifying its consumer and business subscription products, arbitrarily moving free users to a cheaper model and limiting their ability to generate images, and removing the ability to choose which model you use in its $20, $35 and “enterprise” subscriptions, moving any and all choice to its “team” and $200-a-month “pro” subscriptions.
OpenAI’s justification is an exercise in faux-altruism, framing “taking away all choice” as a “real-time router that quickly decides which [model] to use.” ChatGPT Plus and Team members now mostly have access to two models — GPT-5 and GPT-5-Thinking — down from the six they had before.
This distinction is quite significant. Where users once could get hundreds of messages a day on OpenAI’s o4-mini-high and o4-mini reasoning models, GPT-5 for ChatGPT Plus subscribers offers 200 reasoning (GPT-5-thinking) messages a week, with 80 GPT-5 messages every 3 hours which allow you to ask it to “think” about its answer, shoving you over to an undisclosed reasoning model. This may seem like a good deal, OpenAI is likely putting you on the cheapest model whenever it can in the name of “the best choice.”"
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittification-of-generative-ai/