I just visited in Italy. As someone who does these days, I ran through my previous GPT-5 trip to see suggestions and restaurant recommendations. Bot reported that the top choice for dinner near our hotel in Rome was a short walk down 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 place that I would not hesitate to reveal here if I wanted to come back: It is called BABETTE.) The answer was complex and impressive. Among the things there were local reviews from locals, notices in food blogs and the Italian Press, and a combination of popular Roman and modern restaurant food. Oh, and a short walk.
Something was needed from my end as well: Trust. I had to buy into the idea that GPT-5 was a reliable vendor, choosing my restaurant without exception; That the restaurant wasn’t shown to me as sponsored content and wasn’t getting a cut of my check. I might do some serious research on my own to double-check the recommendation (check out the website), but the point of using AI is to bypass that argument.
The experience strengthened my confidence in the results of AI but it also made me wonder: As companies like OpenAi become more powerful, and as they try to return their investors who seem to have the Tech applications we use today?
A play on words
Author and tech critic Cort Doctow calls that erosion “permissive.” His foundation is that platform like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Tiktok to start to please users, but when companies win over competitors, they deliberately become less useful to reap big profits. After the publication of Doctow’s pioneering CorowWow 2022 with something about this phenomenon, the word entered the world, mainly because people saw that it was completely symbolic. Enthittatificitional has been chosen as the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year. The concept has been pointed out so often that it transcends its vulgarity, appearing in places that often hold such noses. Dotorow recently published a strange book on the subject; the cover photo is an emoji of… guess what.
If Chatbots and AI Agents are caused, it is not worse than Google search has become useful, Amazon results suffer from advertisements, and Facebook showing less social content is renewed by productive Clickbait for promotion.
AI is on the verge of becoming a constant companion, providing one-shot answers to many of our requests. People have come to depend on it to help interpret current events and get advice on all kinds of shopping choices – even life choices. Due to the huge cost of building a full-fledged AI model, it is 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 develop their models and get them into the hands of as many people as possible. Right now, I’d say AI is in what Dorow calls “good for users”. But the pressure to bring back the big capital will be enormous – especially for its user companies locked in. Those conditions, as Doctorow writes, allowed companies to reclaim everything they valued. “
When one thinks of the enthittifing of Ai, the first thing that comes to mind is advertising. The nightmare is that AI models will make recommendations based on which companies have paid for placement. That’s not happening now, but AI firms are actively exploring the ad space. In a recent interview, said Open CEO Sam Altman, “I believe there is another cool ad product that can do that is Net Neta to win for the user and our brand and the user.” Meanwhile, OpenAI just announced a deal with Walmart so the retailer’s customers can shop within the chatgt app. I don’t think the arguments there! Dumplexity’s AI Search platform has a system where sponsored results appear by following the following steps. But, it promises, “These ads will not change our commitment to the maintenance of an honest service that gives you direct, non-substantive answers to your questions.”
