Can AI Avoid the Enshittification Trap?

I recently went on vacation As one does these days in Italy, I scoured my itinerary prior to GPT-5 for sightseeing suggestions and restaurant recommendations. Bot reported that the best choice for dinner near our hotel in Rome was a short walk down the Via Margutta. It turned out to be one of the best meals I can remember. When I got home, I asked the model how she chose that restaurant, which I’d hesitate to publish here if I wanted a table somewhere in the future (hell, who knows if I’ll ever come back: it’s called Babette. (Call ahead for reservations.) The answer was complex and fascinating. Reasons included rave reviews from locals, notices in food blogs and the Italian press, and the restaurant’s celebrated fusion of Roman and contemporary cuisine. Oh, and short walks.

I also needed something from the end: faith. I had to buy the idea that GPT-5 was an honest broker, choosing my restaurant without bias; That restaurant doesn’t show me as sponsored content and doesn’t get a cut of my check. I could have done the in-depth research myself to double-check the recommendation (I looked at the website), but the point of using AI is to bypass that friction.

The experience strengthened my confidence in AI outcomes but made me wonder: As companies like OpenAI grow stronger and as they try to return their investors’ money, will AI suffer the value erosion that seems endemic to the technology apps we use today?

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Author and technology critic Cory Doctorow calls that erosion “enchitification.” His premise is that platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook and TikTok start out with the goal of making users happy, but once companies beat out competitors, they become less useful for intentionally reaping big profits. Following the pioneering republishing of WIRED Ph.D 2022 composition About the event, the term entered the vernacular, mainly because people recognized it as fully identified. Enchitification was selected as the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year. The idea has been quoted so many times that it transcends its obscenity, appearing in places that would normally turn their noses up at such words. Doctorow has just been published A famous book on the subject; The cover image is the emoji … guess what.

If chatbots and AI agents become anesthetized, it could be worse than Google search becoming less useful, Amazon results cluttered with ads, and even Facebook showing less social content in favor of rage-generating clickbait.

AI is on its way to becoming a constant companion, providing one-shot answers to many of our requests. People already rely on it to interpret current events and get advice on all kinds of shopping choices and even life choices Due to the huge cost of building a full-fledged AI model, it is fair to assume that only a few companies will dominate this field. All of them 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 At this point, I’d say AI is at what Doctorow calls the “good for users” stage. But the pressure to recoup large capital investments will be enormous—especially for companies with a locked-in user base. These conditions, as Doctorow writes, allow companies to abuse their users and business customers “to recapture all the value for themselves.”

When one imagines AI’s Ensitification, the first thing that comes to mind is advertising. The nightmare is that AI models will make recommendations based on which companies have paid for placements. It’s not happening right now, but AI companies are actively exploring the advertising space. In A recent interview“I believe there are probably some great ad products that we can do that are a net win for the user and kind of positive for our relationship with the user,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Meanwhile, OpenAI just announced a deal with Walmart to allow the retailer’s customers to make purchases within the ChatGPT app. Can’t think of a collision there! AI search platform Perplexity has a program where Sponsor results Appears in clearly labeled follow-ups. But, it promises, “these ads will not change our commitment to maintaining a reliable service that gives you direct, unbiased answers to your questions.”