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

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.

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.