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.

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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.

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el_chaquiste t1_ja48owc wrote

Meta's LLaMA seems to be a step in that direction, even if people like E. Yudkowsky doesn't believe it's any good (basically calling Meta's engineers incompetent).

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rainy_moon_bear t1_ja7lsd5 wrote

It's not open source, and it isn't QAT, so it's behind open-source alternatives for instruct training or RLHF.

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Spire_Citron t1_ja56hz2 wrote

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.

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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!

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Yippeethemagician t1_ja5nsfl wrote

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?

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revolution2018 t1_ja69gvm wrote

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Martholomeow OP t1_ja9wtpl wrote

Yes i was under the impression that businesses exist to give us free stuff. Thanks so much for clearing that up. I’m so glad you’re here to help me understand the world.

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