“The AI you use today is going to be the worst AI you ever use” is a phrase commonly shared by AI educators. This makes sense from a technical development perspective. Even if the scaling laws don’t hold, surely, we will find other ways to improve current genAI systems. While that is likely true, it also falls into the trap of technological determinism. That is the belief that technology will always improve our lives over the long haul. History has shown that this is not always the case.
I’m beginning to believe that we may now be at the pinnacle of the Golden Age of genAI for consumers and prosumers. Right now, genAI products are heavily subsidized and focused on user retention. That means that user experience and quality are the most important priorities. But this won’t last forever. These companies will eventually need to turn a profit. Inevitably this means the experience for users will suffer.
We already see a lack of concern for mental health harms by genAI systems. It only seems to be getting worse, with OpenAI recently making erotica available for its ChatGPT users. On top of that, real monetization almost certainly means advertising and selling user data (assuming that isn’t happening already). When this shift occurs, the experience for users will likely be far worse than what it is today.
It can be hard to imagine what this will look like, but we don’t have to look far to find a similar example. Those of you who used Google web search in the early days were likely blown away by how much better it was than any of the competing search engines. Advertising became a significant part of the platform, making the experience far worse for users. Eventually, advertising became more important than the core product of search. This is abundantly clear, as shown by the documents that were disclosed in Google’s relatively recent antitrust proceedings. They intentionally made the product worse for users in order to continue growing advertising revenue.
If this is the path the profitability for genAI companies, I think it’s likely that we users will suffer the same fate of deteriorating experience, aka enshittification, with these products.
Enjoy it while it lasts.