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The Coming Enshittification of AI

damianmr.com

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Re: The Coming Enshittification of AI

#11

Post by gdulli »

LearnYouALisp wrote: post #8
gdulli wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adver…

"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?

Re: The Coming Enshittification of AI

#12

Post by bluefirebrand »

vanuatu wrote: post #9

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

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

Re: The Coming Enshittification of AI

#13

Post by scoopdewoop »

vanuatu wrote: post #9

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.

Re: The Coming Enshittification of AI

#14

Post by rfwhyte »

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.

Re: The Coming Enshittification of AI

#15

Post by vanuatu »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #12
vanuatu wrote: post #9

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

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

Re: The Coming Enshittification of AI

#17

Post by credit_guy »

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.

Re: The Coming Enshittification of AI

#18

Post by mindcrash »

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.

Re: The Coming Enshittification of AI

#19

Post by AnimalMuppet »

credit_guy wrote: post #17

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…

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.

Re: The Coming Enshittification of AI

#20

Post by overtone1000 »

glaslong wrote: post #10
MarkusQ wrote: post #5

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.

"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.
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