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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Technology
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What tf are tokens?
When you send a message to a chatbot, it cuts it up to little pieces made up of a few letters, assigns numbers to them, does math, and gives you back a bunch of other numbers that it translates back to pieces and puts together into a sentence.
You pay for the chatbot by the amount of little pieces in and little pieces out. The little pieces are the tokens.
I wonder if they make a fortune off engagement padding.
Oh definitely. The whole "reasoning" thing was just sending the answer back as a prompt a few times in different structures, and it was of course all billed
It’s how AI usage is measured and charged.
It's about 4 letters