I was recently on vacation in Italy As one does these days, I made my itinerary beyond the GPT-5 for sightseeing tips and restaurant recommendations. The bot reported that the best option 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. When I got home, I asked the model how she chose that restaurant, which I’m hesitant to reveal here in case I want a table in the future (Col, who knows if I’ll even go back—her name is Babette. Call ahead to book.) The answer was complex and impressive. Factors included rave reviews from locals, notices in food blogs and the Italian press, and the restaurant’s celebrated blend of Roman and contemporary cuisine. Oh, and the short walk.
Something was required from my end as well: trust. I had to accept the idea that GPT-5 was an honest broker, choosing my restaurant without prejudice; that the restaurant wasn’t showing me as sponsored content and I wasn’t getting a cut of my check. I could have done some deep research on my own to verify the recommendation (I looked up the website), but the point of using AI is to avoid this friction.
The experience strengthened my confidence in the results of AI, but it also made me wonder: As companies like OpenAI grow more powerful and as they try to pay back their investors, will AI be prone to the value erosion that seems endemic to the technology applications we use today?
word game
Technology writer and critic Cory Doctorow calls this erosion “enshittification.” Its premise is that platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and TikTok start out as appealing to users, but once the companies beat out competitors, they intentionally become less useful in order to make 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 in full view. Enshittification was chosen as the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year. The concept has been cited so often that it transcends its profanity, appearing in places that would normally be hidden by such a word. Doctorow has just published a book of the same name on the subject; the cover image is the emoji of… guess what.
If chatbots and AI agents integrate, it could be worse, with Google search becoming less useful, Amazon results cluttered with ads, and even Facebook showing less social content in favor of anger-inducing clicks.
AI is on a trajectory to be a constant companion, providing one-shot answers to many of our requests. People already trust her to help interpret current events and get advice on all kinds of buying options, and even life choices. Due to the massive costs of building a full AI model, it’s fair to assume that only a few companies will dominate the field. They 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’d say AI is in what Doctorow calls the “good for users” stage. But the pressure to recoup massive capital investments will be tremendous, especially for companies whose user base is locked in. These conditions, as Doctorow writes, allow companies to abuse their users and business customers “to recapture all the value for themselves.”
When one imagines the enshittification of AI, the first thing that comes to mind is advertising. The nightmare is that the AI models will make recommendations based on which companies have paid for the placement. That’s not happening now, but AI companies are actively exploring the advertising space. In a recent interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “I think there’s probably some great ad product that we can make that’s a net win for the user and kind of positive for our relationship with the user.” Meanwhile, OpenAI just announced a deal with Walmart to allow the retailer’s customers to 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 tracks. But, he promises, “these announcements won’t change our commitment to maintaining a trusted service that gives you straight, unbiased answers to your questions.”
