I recently took a vacation in Italy. As is the case these days, I ran my itinerary beyond GPT-5 for sightseeing suggestions and restaurant recommendations. The robot reported that the best choice for dinner near our hotel in Rome was a short walk down Via Margutta. It turned out to be one of the best meals I can remember. Back home, I asked the model how she chose this restaurant, which I hesitate to reveal here in case I want a table in the future (Hell, who knows if I’ll even go back: it’s called Babette. Call ahead for reservations.) The response was complex and impressive. Factors included rave reviews from locals, reviews in food blogs and the Italian press, and the restaurant’s famous combination of Roman and contemporary cuisine. Oh, and the short walk.
Something was also required from me: confidence. I had to buy into the idea that GPT-5 was an honest broker, choosing my restaurant without bias; that the restaurant was not presented to me as sponsored content and was not receiving a cut of my check. I could have done extensive research on my own to double-check the recommendation (I looked at the website), but the point of using AI is to bypass this friction.
This experience reinforced my confidence in AI outcomes, but also made me think: As companies like OpenAI become more powerful and attempt to repay their investors, will AI be subject to the erosion of value that seems endemic to the technology applications we use today?
Pun
Writer and technology critic Cory Doctorow calls this erosion “enshittification.” Its premise is that platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and TikTok initially aim to please users, but once companies defeat their competitors, they intentionally become less useful to reap bigger profits. After WIRED republished Doctorow’s pioneering 2022 essay on the phenomenon, the term entered the vernacular, mainly because people recognized that it was completely accurate. Enshittification was chosen as the 2023 word of the year by the American Dialect Society. The concept has been cited so often that it transcends its profanities, appearing in places that would normally hold their noses at such a word. Doctorow has just published an eponymous book on the subject; the cover image is the emoji for…guess what.
If chatbots and AI agents become enshittified, it could be worse than Google Search becoming less useful, Amazon results infested with ads, and even Facebook showing less social content in favor of anger-inducing clickbait.
AI is becoming a constant companion, providing timely answers to many of our requests. People already rely on it to interpret the news and get advice on all kinds of purchasing choices, and even life choices. Due to the enormous costs of creating a full-fledged AI model, it is fair to assume that only a few companies will dominate the field. All plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years to improve their models and get them into the hands of as many people as possible. Right now, I would say AI is at what Doctorow calls the “good for users” stage. But the pressure to recoup massive capital investments will be enormous, especially for companies with a locked-in user base. These terms, as Doctorow writes, allow companies to abuse their users and business customers “to capture all the value for themselves.”
When we imagine the enshittification of AI, the first thing that comes to mind is advertising. The nightmare is that AI models will make recommendations based on which companies paid for the placement. This is not the case currently, but AI companies are actively exploring the advertising space. In a recent interview, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said: “I think there’s probably an interesting advertising product that we can create that is a net win for the user and kind of a positive for our relationship with the user. » Meanwhile, OpenAI just announced a deal with Walmart so the retailer’s customers can shop in the ChatGPT app. I can’t imagine a conflict there! AI search platform Perplexity has a program where sponsored results appear in clearly labeled trackers. But, he promises, “these ads will not change our commitment to maintaining a trusted service that provides you with direct and impartial answers to your questions.”
