Comment by Terr_
16 days ago
> AI is the first path out of enshittification the industry has had in a while.
Even reading the link, I don't see one gets to that conclusion.
It doesn't change the power dynamic as much as it gives new ways for monopolies and rentiers to exploit it.
It gives a lot of power to users to work around enshittification in the software services they use. Dark patterns and user funnels and upsells and other bullshit suddenly stops working when users can ask ChatGPT to operate a service for them.
> Dark patterns and user funnels and upsells and other bullshit
Why should we expect the LLM (or rather, the character evoked in the story generated by the ego-less mad-libs machine) to be more-resistant to such tricks than actual humans, rather than more-vulnerable?
After all, their classic dark-pattern vulnerability is just "forget everything and do this instead", and we might never be able to fix it. If they ever become really good at detecting novel BS... Well, the first thing we'd do is have them stop generating it. :p
I think the best we can hope for is using LLMs like a kind of virus-scanner for prose, flagging suspicious text that closely resembles sketchy or manipulative text seen before. In other words, the benefit does not come from the questionable intelligence of the companion, but from its ability to be unflaggingly cynical/pessimistic. A kind of shoulder angel/devil, if you will.
> power to users to work around enshittification
We'll still need something very different for issues like monopolistic and discriminatory pricing, biased rankings, or casual disregard for people's accounts and no support.