The Coming Enshittification of AI

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 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

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.