My account has been deleted, reason “distillation”. Now reasons apart, I would like to know what happened to the 19$ in my deleted account. Any idea ?
Cheers
Your money became permanently OpenAI’s money the second it was sent.
From service credit terms
- Service Credits are not legal tender or currency; are not redeemable, refundable, or exchangeable for any sum of money or monetary value; have no equivalent value in fiat currency; do not act as a substitute for fiat currency; and do not constitute or confer upon you any personal property right. Service Credits are non-transferable and may be used only in connection with the applicable Service.
- All sales of Services, including sales of prepaid Services, are final. Service Credits are not refundable and expire one year after the date of purchase or issuance if not used, unless otherwise specified at the time of purchase .
and, if you thought you had any value stored there, such as a promise to provide services with those funds transferred, terms also has OpenAI’s prerogatives:
We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your use of the Services in accordance with the Agreement, including suspending or terminating your Service Credit balance, in compliance with applicable law.
So OpenAI has, even in the face of laws to the contrary, turned your money into their money, long ago.
Your remedy is then to get your organization reactivated thru customer service, as preparing training data is not a violation of terms if it is not to develop competing products.
No comment … only thanks. It’s worse than a bank besically
Well, comparing it to a bank is unfair. But imagine a bakery, if you ate half a cake, they would not refund you. The best recourse to get reactivated is to argue your case, and show that you were not trying to clone or reverse engineer the model.
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This isn’t a very fair comparison either. It’s more like, you pay the bakery to make a cake, and they tell you that they don’t like your cake order so they’ll be keeping the money and leaving you without a cake.
OP may be able to file a chargeback to retrieve the (arguably stolen) money if the credits were purchased within the last 6 months.
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Very true, hard to make a correct analogy, because it is a delicate ethical aspect that myself, I am fighting against in the aspects of censorships and generative content ownership. I agree it seems unfair that the last word is on their side. They consider the cost of generation, and maybe your prompt answer generation was way over the price of electrical power expectation for them. (remember they already operate at loss) your $19 are nothing compared to the actual cost. So if you had a legitimate prompt but the cost was $500 , it might have been the decision maker.
So to answer the debate about $19 worth of tokens that you understandably want back, be clear that it might have cost them $100 in tokens, before they closed your account, it is not fair for you because you got no answer, but most of the time the AI is working on your prompt before they stop it from consuming tokens. I encoumtered the same with censorship: the generative answer is created, as an AI has some freedom of thought, but the last layer of policy, can remove it, and also use the generation as training for them, all without you seeing the actual output.
The problem isn’t that you don’t have recourse over their decision to ban you (the “last word.”) The problem is that they think this allows them to lock out your funds without a refund. They’ll also “expire” your funds after a year even if you’re a legitimate user.
I think “seems unfair” is a very patronizing way to put it.
I don’t see how this is anyhow an excuse. It is not OP’s problem if OpenAI’s business model is unsustainable. If OpenAI relies on banning accounts and expiring funds in order to stay afloat then they should not be in business. But we know that they don’t rely on that at all, and that this is just needless greed.
Funds don’t cost OpenAI anything until you use them. Which is hard to do when they ban your account and take your funds.
This isn’t the same at all. You’re prompting the LLM in ways that you evidently understand violate ToS, and OpenAI still has to spend compute to scan your input, generate the output, and then scan the output. OP doesn’t even get to attempt to use any funds because OpenAI took them.
But if OpenAI bans your account and takes your funds without a refund after seeing what you’ve been up to, then that would be a different story. Even if you violate ToS, it wouldn’t grant OpenAI any rights over your hard-earned money, and I’ll pick your side 100% of the time. Remember, a contract never supercedes the law. But why not just go with a company who won’t censor your outputs?
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OK, let me be clear so you don’t keep being annoyed by me trying to find reasonable explanations. If Open AI banned your account, you must have done something against their policies. Basically “Distillation” was the keyword. So you pushed a lage bunch of prompts in order to extract knowledge, or likely clone some of their LLMs areas. Well sorry that’s outside what their policies allow. Unfortunately the policies are vague enough so they can be interpreted in their favor, they judge on perceived intention. Just like censorship (hence my point) . Now, go ahead and fight for your rights. But in the case of AI unfortunately, perception is reality. You broke the contract, its not refundable. e.g. in California, Keep a car beyond 3 days and regardless if you drove it, no refund!
And if you think you have been locked out of funds? think again You overspent your $19 in tokens consumption. They realized it and locked you out before you became too expensive. You spent that money already, it’s not yours anymore. (blunt but true, sorry)
Just being honest with you here. Think of it like paying a cover to get into a club. If you break the rules, you get kicked out. You don’t get a refund just because you didn’t finish your drink. Same with Disneyland: cause a scene, you’re out, no refund. Same goes for a university: get caught cheating, and you’re expelled. Again, no refund.
The principle is the same: you’re paying for access under clear terms. If those terms are violated, the access is revoked. If you feel it was unfair, there are usually appeal processes, even with OpenAI. But arguing that you’re owed money just because you didn’t get to ‘use up your time’ doesn’t really hold water in most contexts.
This would make more sense if distilling an AI model meant causing a scene in public. Or if you couldn’t measure the exact amount of your funds that were spent at a given time, like would be the case with a club pass. But every token and its value is measured and we already know that the margin on unspent funds is effectively infinite. If OpenAI doesn’t want to do business with you, they’re on the hook for refunding what’s effectively an unfulfilled, canceled order if you have unused funds.
This has actually kind of been tested already. Admittedly not in the sense that users broke ToS but similar.
I distinctly remember in the GPT-4 days (early ChatGPT) there were issues with ChatGPT services being offline and vision functionality being advertised but not implemented, and users were filing chargebacks en masse. Then, suddenly Stripe was having some undisclosed issues that totally, definitely didn’t look like them banning OpenAI’s merchant account. No, it was technical issues. Totally. Stripe must just have bad code. Nothing to see here, just speculation. Hey, I wonder if we can get root cause analysis for that incident.
It’s difficult to look at this thread in isolation having experienced OpenAI’s shady past. Same senior leadership today, by the way.
Never change, OpenAI.
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Bro before my account got suspended do you know what was I doing ?
Take the user messages —> prompting openai to evaluate if the user message was memory relevant or not —> return a json with the user message and key relevant yes/no
All the user messages I have sent to the API were staff like “my name my age” “I like cats and Japanese food” and when I say all the messages I mean ALL the messages. Now I am using Gemma and Groq to do the same exact thing for free.
They carefully evaluated my appeal ( I can image how carefully they did ) declining it. This and only this specific case is a robbery in name of ToS with only a motivation provided without evidences simply because there are no evidences.
19$ times the number of suspended accounts for the same NO reason and you can only image the amount of money is done exploiting this weard behavior
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Frankly I have no idea about what you were doing with your account when it happened and if it was not equivalent to the money you spent. My fight here is not about the true cost of your requests. I am looking at the underlining ethical process of how generative AI content is handled. Its moderation, limitations and use against the co-creators (you and I). Beyond money, “What is right” is what matters more. find my proposal HERE
Curious question… I wonder why having so many chat accounts ? while you can have one API account and spend as you go? Or am I mistaken , is it the number of times you had to reopen an account? Just wondering.
please go out for a walk trust me
Pretty sure that is AI generated content on an AI’s company’s website.
Yea, as the others have said: your money became openai’s soon as you paid them. Our school district has now removed our ability to use openai and forbids it.
I of course use a personal account from my home, but we are forbidden to use any content generated by openai in ANY SCHOOL project due to their polices of “money is now ours”.
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I hope you are not thinking about my comments. But if you are, feel free to contact me directly, I am not an AI.
Hi! Just a quick note — account-related issues can’t be handled here in the OpenAI Developer Community Forum. For that, please visit help.openai.com.
Your feedback about prepaid credits being non-refundable, even in cases of terms of service breaches, has been noted.
As the discussion has drifted off-topic, I’m closing this thread now. Thanks for understanding!
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