Technology

And the enshitification cycle continues...

They're already getting sued over ChatGPT helping people commit suicide. Imagine the uproar once the advice comes with ads for rope, knives, etc...

Most obvious thing to ever happen since ads being added to Instagram feeds. It's a search engine replacement. It was going to end up with basic advertisments eventually. Then targeted advertisements. Then sponsored results as sneaky as they can be in the case of suggesting the best solution/product. Free open source models and stuff like proton and duckduckgo if you really want to use AI search engines

The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.

If the product is free...

BigTech 101

I suppose identifying AI is going to be a lot easier when users copy and paste answers that contain some sort of ad roll.

It’s gonna be really hard to argue your Grapes of Wrath essay wasn’t AI generated when you submit without proofreading and don’t catch the sponsored ad for Walmart+ grocery delivery.

Ublock origin. Hold my beer!

Hmm stunned disbelief, I tell ya. How on earth did anyone ever think this could happen, big corpo putting ads inside the most hyper targeted machine the world has ever seen. How could they ever decide to do this

"You want to know how to combat your depression? Sure, but what about a cold Pepsi first?"

Imagine it writing your essay about Nazi Germany for you and in the middle it asks you whether you think Göring would have enjoyed a Big Mac right about now.

I feel like nobody read the article. It mentioned an “ad carousel” which would be a fairly standard way to offset costs on free plans. I don’t see that specifically as being enshitification. Now, if they start altering AI responses, that is definitely enshitification. I have no doubt they will eventually get there, but I don’t think that’s what this article is about.

Too bad larger LLMs require ungodly amounts of VRAM, or self-hosting would be a good alternative. LLMs have their uses, but they’re not useful enough to put up with ads.

I think we’ve hit the end times for AI. The biggest player in the space OpenAI couldn’t be profitable by selling its services to business, nor directly to consumers. Subscription moneys nor licensing its models is working too. So the last avenue they have is this, shilling to marketers hoping for scrap.

On top of Nvidia having to stop selling RAM I think the breaks are about to hit AI and hard once the current supply runs out. I wonder how long that could take?

No matter how profitable a company is (which doesn't apply here) it can't resist increasing profits even more. They are all like an AI being told to make paperclips and not stopping until they have converted the entire mass of the universe into paperclips.

And on that day, nobody was surprised.

Sounds like my AI usage is gonna fall from "infrequent" to "never", if the ads are indeed unblockable...

First it was ignorantly stupid, now it'll be purposefully misleading towards ads. Who could have seen that coming?

Where's the end of work life as we know it that we were promised?

Oh no. I'll have to look at ads while I make use of their fantastic and totally useful product, oh yeah, never mind.

Ads are bad mmkay?
~ These guys

Also these guys:

Rapid enshittification, people will just use on of the others on the long list of alternatives. I currently recommend either DeepSeek v3.2-Exp or Kimi K2 Thinking.