>Where's the money coming from....

That is literally how all credit card purchases work. And yes you are right. Based on that looks like that inflation rocket is headed to the moon. The general population is just not capable of seeing even one layer beneath the surface of a system.

Its like that skit where the people ask the programmer why they cannot have three parallel lines that intersect (or something like that) and he says "geometry."

You all are getting way to much into money theory. If a credit card processor charges 2-5% per purchase the business is going to pass that cost directly to the customer. Its not "inflation the definition" but it causes all prices to go up as they include that in their price model. Even if you don't use a credit card. Very few large business give a cash discount to consumers.

>Based on that looks like that inflation rocket is headed to the moon.

???

Surely you realize that unsecured revolving credit is going to have higher interest rates than government debt?

Credit spends exactly the same as cash. All outstanding credit card debt is essentially an increase in the money supply.

>All outstanding credit card debt is essentially an increase in the money supply.

And how big is credit card debt compared to M2 supply?

You could say the same of affiliate links on Wirecutter, or any other marketing expense.

Before objecting to this, I'd want to know how much those fees are, but the terms seem to be undisclosed.

I bought a new pair of glasses online on Saturday evening as I couldn't be bothered going to a store to try them on. The website had a "virtual try on" feature that would overlay the glasses on your face, and even though the result wasn't great (lighting was off etc. so it wasn't a genuine reflection of what they'd look like), I thought it was pretty cool / useful. An AI-powered version of that which could make it look real would be killer, as long as what you're shown matches the product and isn't some hallucinated bastardisation.

> Where's the money coming from to pay the fee? From my wallet, of course! At scale, this raises the price of purchases.

This is true, but standard practice. As long as you’ll purchase the product (more conveniently than you otherwise would), the marketing costs are worth it.

ChatGPT isn’t text only. I’m sure I’ve seen carousels with image cards.

Not really, this is just effectively a new supply side platform for advertisers. Retail companies will just allocate a percentage of their marketing budget to OAI instead of Google/Meta

Yep, in some ways it's good to be the price sensitive side of the transaction. Can't really take more of the money people don't have.