Brace for the enshitification of AI

Submitted by Martholomeow t3_11clusg in singularity

We’re enjoying the honeymoon phase of ChatGPT et al but soon they will go down the same path as every other product.

Cory Doctorow calls it enshitification. Products like google search, facebook, tiktok and amazon all start out giving users what we want in order to lure us in, but inevitably switch to giving us what they want to give us in order to make money.

Here’s more from his blog post last month: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I can see this going in two directions. DALL-e has its paid tokens, which i think is a great way to avoid the problem. Bing and Bard will surely be pushing results that microsoft and google can monetize.

26

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

HeinrichTheWolf_17 t1_ja3qorz wrote

Open Source options are a great remedy for this issue (See Stable Diffusion). Now we just have to get the same thing for LLMs.

66

revolution2018 t1_ja4ypw3 wrote

Enshitification is only bad while model training and the hardware that runs it is crazy expensive. What matters is that the big money drives down those costs. It won't take long.

And then the open source community will step in. They will not engage in enshitification. That leaves the big corporations competing against a superior product that is free to use.

So go ahead, enshitify. I love watching big companies die!

16

gay_manta_ray t1_ja54dh2 wrote

i don't think enshitification necessarily applies to ai. it isn't something that will be completely centralized and under the purview of a few companies forever, eventually it will be completely decentralized and the most powerful AIs may not be "controllable" in the traditional sense at all.

3

Spire_Citron t1_ja56hz2 wrote

Replying to HeinrichTheWolf_17 (#2,028,010)

Yup. As long as there are open source models, things may stop getting better, but they can't get worse. But also they probably will get better, because it's the community that provides a lot of the improvements, not people trying to make money.

3

Yippeethemagician t1_ja5nsfl wrote

Replying to revolution2018 (#2,036,014)

Shit. An optimist. I mean I want you to be right. But the state of our workd says otherwise. We got farmers hacking their own machines to fix them. How good is it going to be when they throw an ai on there that you need to jailbreak?

8

revolution2018 t1_ja69gvm wrote

Replying to Yippeethemagician (#2,040,706)

If I'm being honest the idea of farmers having to outsmart an AI doesn't upset me. Don't get me wrong, corporate interests using regulatory capture to block their customers from repairing equipment is an evil that needs to be defeated. I'm not supporting that.

But I do support the larger societal implications of AI and accelerating technology becoming prevalent in every facet of every person's life. That would make having a mindset of actively seeking to learn and embracing progress a required skill for basic everyday life. Yes, I know that is anathema to some and I think it's going to go really badly for them. I'm fine with that so yeah, optimist on all thing tech related.

5

maskedpaki t1_ja6ipea wrote

even if they do this they have to make the ai better in order to make more money

more intelligence = higher profits no matter their business model.

2

DukkyDrake t1_ja9w2y8 wrote

> but inevitably switch to giving us what they want to give us in order to make money.

Do you really think businesses exists to give you free stuff? There is no switch, that's the business model from day 1, they just lack the resources to do fancy stuff when starting out.

0