In order for that to be the case, subscribers would have to actually stop paying once ads are introduced. Otherwise, the service gets to keep the premium-subscriber revenue stream and gain the advertiser revenue stream too.
With apologies to Kipling:
It is always a temptation to a paid-subscription station
To reach out to its audience and say —
"Thanks for paying for our site! We'll be running ads tonight;
We are betting that you will not go away."
From the examples of cable TV, newspaper and magazine subscriptions before that, and subscription streaming video services today, I have to suspect that this sort of thing wouldn't yield "an ad-free Internet". You'd pay, and get ads too.
At some point as a child, I discovered from popular culture that children are supposed to hate broccoli and fear the dentist. This confused me because broccoli is fine and the dentist is friendly and makes sure my teeth are healthy.
If I did not have any of my own experiences of eating broccoli or going to the dentist, and was asked to depict these experiences based on what I read and saw in popular culture, I would have depicted them as horrors.
But my own experiences of broccoli and the dentist were not horrors; they were neutral to positive.
When I ask ChatGPT to depict children's feelings about broccoli, it draws a boy with a pained expression, holding a broccoli crown and saying "YUCK!"
When I ask it to depict children's feelings about the dentist, it draws the same boy with the same pained expression, exclaiming "NO!" while a masked woman approaches with dental tools in hand.
ChatGPT has never had an experience. All it has to go on is what someone told it. And what someone told it is no more accurate than what popular culture told me I was supposed to feel about broccoli and the dentist.
In World A, it "is a religion".
In World B, it "is not a religion".
What do you do differently in World A versus in World B?
Does it "being a religion" justify you spending time on it every week? Does it "being a religion" mean that you dismiss it outright as stupid and pointless? Does it "being a religion" make you advocate for it to be represented in the Parliament of World Religions? Does it "being a religion" mean that it should get military chaplains?
What is the material, decision-making consequence of this classification choice?
1Contrary view: The use of self-torture to promote goodness is an s-risk. The kingdom of heaven looks like people doing good deeds for each other out of love and delight, not out of guilt- and shame-avoidance.
I notice that a lot of these are in common with abusive relationship behaviors.
Weapons are different. While Tools multiply agency and Minds embody it, Weapons are designed to erode it.
An alternative name for this category would be Boss.
Bosses are designed to install you as their underling, a cog in their machine, a compliant participant in their schemes. This may be by hiring you (e.g. paying you to provide creative effort or complete tasks), offering you something else (such as fame, meaning, or getting to promote your ideas) — or threatening you, tricking you, pretending to be your god and demanding worship.
There can be good (or at least tolerable) Bosses, who want something specific and limited from you (like a bounded amount of labor on a non-harmful project) and are willing to negotiate and pay fairly for it (typically with money).
But Bosses are prone to demand more and more from you (more time, more loyalty, more letting them rewrite parts of your mind), to give less and less, and to never ever negotiate as your equal.
Bosses sometimes pretend to be Tools: "We're not hiring drivers, we're providing them a secure platform to find paying passengers." "We're not hiring video creators, we're giving them tools to find and monetize audiences."
A little sociolinguistics cures a lot of prescriptivism.
Alice has income and assets, but has never taken out a loan of any sort, and so has no credit history. But then she shows up wanting a loan. Clearly something new is happening; Alice never needed a loan before, but now she does. A spot-check of Alice's income and assets says "sure, it looks like she could repay that loan, no problem" — but what that spot-check doesn't reveal is, what's actually going on here? Why does she need a loan now when she didn't previously? Normal people¹ have been in debt before. Alice hasn't. Does that make Alice less of a risk, or more? Hard to tell — and that uncertainty is what creditors want to manage.
¹ "Ready, normal people?" "Ready!"
It makes sense that animals evolved the capacity to experience pain and suffering, because we have bodies that can be injured, starved, sickened, and so on. There are stimuli that correctly identify threats to our well-being; and so we have developed to perceive those stimuli as noxious and well-worth-avoiding. But this suggests that a mind that developed without such threats would not need the capacity to suffer, just as a fish that lives in a pitch-black cave does not need the capacity to see.