The article assumes that AI will get shitty the same way search, social media, etc. did. I don't think this is the case at all. It's pretty clear that LLMs will rapidly discover entirely new and innovative ways to be shitty.
It's very true that successive generations of technology innovate qualitatively worse hostilities that people accept in exchange for the surface convenience or novelty.
Regular TV has non-targeted commercials you can skip. Streaming has surveillance and unskippable ads.
AI can take it a step further and make promoted editorial content a seamless part of a conversation, without disclosure. It's the holy grail of advertising. To think they'll leave that money on the table is ridiculous.
Advertisement or idea. In whatever ways they can make it subtle enough.
It's not like brand names and arbitrary ideas won't have ways they regularly show up in LLM output organically. So how would we ever know when they become ad placements?
I'm not so sure. The market is very competitive and trust/reputation is a huge factor. People will notice if someone introduced ads, no matter how innovative they are; and once they do that, it's game over.
It's unclear to me how this will play out because LLMs don't have the same network / platform effects as the other examples (Uber / Facebook), nor is there one dominant LLM that is overwhelmingly better than the competition for consumers (Google). There's overwhelming competition from the open source cheap models especially for the lower-mid intelligence use cases
I agree. I don't see why something getting more competition and plummeting costs is going to get significantly worse. Meta being Meta is not the strongest argument.
Even if not, there's pricing pressure between chat, gemini, and claude. The products seem to be comparable for laypeople which is why OpenAI has been investing a ton in their memory feature to try to lock in users
Microsoft has already started. Copilot is now sitting behind a forced full browser window login popup.
And I do really mean forced popup, because all default functionality - which is still available to a anonymous user - is available right behind said popup, which I can clearly see due to the few milliseconds it takes before their shitty React code triggers the visibility of said popup on my secondary laptop.
I dispute that. Enshitification happens when the user does not pay for the product. The provider of the service has to find alternative ways of monetization. As a user, this feels shitty, but you get what you pay for. With AI, if you pay for usage, you can demand that the service provided not be shitty. You can even litigate, but the most important leverage is the threat to take your business elsewhere. Enough people do that and the provided service stops being shitty in a hurry.
I think you are unduly optimistic. There is little that prevents it from happening to a product that you pay for. Airline flights, for example.
All it takes is cost-conscious customers who will accept a worse product for less money. There will be competition to see how who can go farther down the "worse" curve.
This article describes well how advertising and such degrades the quality of the product, but it isn’t really enshittification unless the platform is also turning the screw on its suppliers. This might be the case for services downstream of frontier model providers, but OpenAI and friends aren’t turning the screw on NVidia or utilities.
If anything them trying to do the customer-side enshittification before securing both ends of their market is just a sign that they’re troubled and will likely not ever reach that point.
I have never been forced to watch an add on the Facebook app nor the Instagram app but the moment that happens to me I will uninstall both immediately. At this point Facebook is lamer/worse than MySpace ever was.
This has always and will always be my fundamental concern regarding AI. It will inevitably be enshittified, and its enshittification will be both subtle and opaque, in ways the average users will be ill equipped to identify or avoid.
The ultimate problem will be, unless users are running their own local LLMs (which will of course perpetually remain a tiny, insignificant fraction of all AI users) the AI isn't going to be working in the interests of the user, but the rather the interest of the corporation that built it, and the advertisers that pay said corporation.
At least with social or search there are ad standards that the platforms all broadly follow that identify when something is an ad, where as the AI companies will almost certainly either ignore ad standards guidelines or find some loophole they feel justifies not disclosing to users when the answers their AI provides are effectively ads in disguise.
With search, if you search for say "Cheapest car insurance" you at least have a fighting chance of successfully determining which links are ads, which are spam and which are potentially useful content, but with AI, its just going to provide a single supposedly authoritative answer, that the user will think is the best answer to their question, but is in fact whichever answer an advertiser has paid the AI company to have the AI supply.
The article assumes that AI will get shitty the same way search, social media, etc. did. I don't think this is the case at all. It's pretty clear that LLMs will rapidly discover entirely new and innovative ways to be shitty.
It's very true that successive generations of technology innovate qualitatively worse hostilities that people accept in exchange for the surface convenience or novelty.
Regular TV has non-targeted commercials you can skip. Streaming has surveillance and unskippable ads.
AI can take it a step further and make promoted editorial content a seamless part of a conversation, without disclosure. It's the holy grail of advertising. To think they'll leave that money on the table is ridiculous.
"Claude, integrate this mini advertisement into my blog post as if it was part of the story", is that WYM?
Advertisement or idea. In whatever ways they can make it subtle enough.
It's not like brand names and arbitrary ideas won't have ways they regularly show up in LLM output organically. So how would we ever know when they become ad placements?
"Claude, devise a dark patterned ad network for a recursive death cult centered around my god given right to be a pedophile."
"Why Your AI Girlfriend Keeps Telling You To Drink More Ovaltine"
Coming to a NYT Opinion column any day now
Thanks, now I'm craving Ovaltine for the first time in 20 years.
I miss her too. :(
I'm not so sure. The market is very competitive and trust/reputation is a huge factor. People will notice if someone introduced ads, no matter how innovative they are; and once they do that, it's game over.
It's unclear to me how this will play out because LLMs don't have the same network / platform effects as the other examples (Uber / Facebook), nor is there one dominant LLM that is overwhelmingly better than the competition for consumers (Google). There's overwhelming competition from the open source cheap models especially for the lower-mid intelligence use cases
I agree. I don't see why something getting more competition and plummeting costs is going to get significantly worse. Meta being Meta is not the strongest argument.
The vast majority of people don't know what an Open model is or how to use one, or even that it is an option
For now!
Even if not, there's pricing pressure between chat, gemini, and claude. The products seem to be comparable for laypeople which is why OpenAI has been investing a ton in their memory feature to try to lock in users
That’s only one away from being a classic tech duopoly
Microsoft has already started. Copilot is now sitting behind a forced full browser window login popup.
And I do really mean forced popup, because all default functionality - which is still available to a anonymous user - is available right behind said popup, which I can clearly see due to the few milliseconds it takes before their shitty React code triggers the visibility of said popup on my secondary laptop.
Local llm is so important to avoid ads, because the future of AI is tons of ads
I dispute that. Enshitification happens when the user does not pay for the product. The provider of the service has to find alternative ways of monetization. As a user, this feels shitty, but you get what you pay for. With AI, if you pay for usage, you can demand that the service provided not be shitty. You can even litigate, but the most important leverage is the threat to take your business elsewhere. Enough people do that and the provided service stops being shitty in a hurry.
How many providers do you have to pay for to watch your favorite teams play in all their competitions now vs 20 years ago?
How different is the experience booking an economy flight today vs 20 years ago?
I think you are unduly optimistic. There is little that prevents it from happening to a product that you pay for. Airline flights, for example.
All it takes is cost-conscious customers who will accept a worse product for less money. There will be competition to see how who can go farther down the "worse" curve.
This article describes well how advertising and such degrades the quality of the product, but it isn’t really enshittification unless the platform is also turning the screw on its suppliers. This might be the case for services downstream of frontier model providers, but OpenAI and friends aren’t turning the screw on NVidia or utilities.
If anything them trying to do the customer-side enshittification before securing both ends of their market is just a sign that they’re troubled and will likely not ever reach that point.
I have never been forced to watch an add on the Facebook app nor the Instagram app but the moment that happens to me I will uninstall both immediately. At this point Facebook is lamer/worse than MySpace ever was.
The posts ARE the ads. This is why people get less and less posts from their relevant friends.
This has always and will always be my fundamental concern regarding AI. It will inevitably be enshittified, and its enshittification will be both subtle and opaque, in ways the average users will be ill equipped to identify or avoid.
The ultimate problem will be, unless users are running their own local LLMs (which will of course perpetually remain a tiny, insignificant fraction of all AI users) the AI isn't going to be working in the interests of the user, but the rather the interest of the corporation that built it, and the advertisers that pay said corporation.
At least with social or search there are ad standards that the platforms all broadly follow that identify when something is an ad, where as the AI companies will almost certainly either ignore ad standards guidelines or find some loophole they feel justifies not disclosing to users when the answers their AI provides are effectively ads in disguise.
With search, if you search for say "Cheapest car insurance" you at least have a fighting chance of successfully determining which links are ads, which are spam and which are potentially useful content, but with AI, its just going to provide a single supposedly authoritative answer, that the user will think is the best answer to their question, but is in fact whichever answer an advertiser has paid the AI company to have the AI supply.