There's the term "Enshittification:" products decay over time. Almost always to allow companies to make more money (e.g. via ads etc.) We need a term for "AI enshittification." Where AI functionality is added: that degrades the product experience. Except the company now makes LESS money on it!! - ThreadSky

gergely.pragmaticengineer.com • 105 days ago

There's the term "Enshittification:" products decay over time. Almost always to allow companies to make more money (e.g. via ads etc.)

We need a term for "AI enshittification." Where AI functionality is added: that degrades the product experience.

Except the company now makes LESS money on it!!

Comments

brianokken.bsky.social•105 days ago

Versification works.
The 1984 novel had the versificator, which created dreadful rubbish songs without human intervention.

brianokken.bsky.social•105 days ago

AI-nshitification
Or just Ainshitification

brianokken.bsky.social•105 days ago

“jumping on the bland-wagon” since the strategy is so obvious and boring.

triptych90.bsky.social•104 days ago

This will happen rapidly if AI is trained on its own output over and over. The results can be pretty bizarre. I've seen the terms "AI poisoning" and "AI eating itself".

bobsalmon.bsky.social•105 days ago

There's a nuance to this, at least as Cory Doctorow first coined it (https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/). If you define "product" as "thing that helps end users" then it does get worse. If you define it as "thing that makes money for the provider" then it's *planned* and gets *better*.

bobsalmon.bsky.social•105 days ago

Decay suggests inattention and not being planned. This is deliberate, and exploits lock-in via network effects etc. It systematically moves through a series of sources of income (users, partners, etc.) temporarily favouring the current one to lock it in before moving to the next.

kiltedcurmudgeon.bsky.social•104 days ago

AI is only as good as the data set they have to work from. Over collection and indexing of useless data points leads to horrible slop.

How long before AI-powered Clippy starts producing different results and performance based on the age, race, gender, or geography of the user? Holy lawsuits!

fellat.bsky.social•105 days ago

I read that M$ also began to push AI in their products.

Btw I'm really happy that I have @proton.me for 7 years now and it costs me $10/months.

saeedwkhan.bsky.social•105 days ago

AInshittification?
EnshittificAItion?
Fecal Intelligence?
AInal Experience?

lundyfox.bsky.social•104 days ago

I like AInshitification because it’s almost right but isn’t.

Like AI

If someone didn’t research properly they wouldn’t know

alex.mcroberts.me•105 days ago

I’d argue it’s not just limited to AI. Plenty of companies add features all the time becoming feature factories.

They add more features, making it costlier to maintain, and don’t see significant customer or revenue growth.

tylerhillery.com•105 days ago

Slopification

parth.dev•105 days ago

Why create a new term? It’s still just enshitification. The term is inclusive of any all forms of product degradation as a result of chasing profit and growth.

vicwolk.bsky.social•104 days ago

I normally use "natural entropy of services/products".

It works in other languages as well.

nikaspran.bsky.social•105 days ago

There's like 6 AI buttons on every Jira screen now and all of them are shit

ideamarcos.bsky.social•105 days ago

Need a set of orly books for the product side

austinjxseph.bsky.social•105 days ago

I would get the hype train for most companies–but why would Google (or even Apple) ship such half baked slop, I don’t understand

identifyasaproblem.bsky.social•104 days ago

Look up Planned Obsolescence. Then look up Planned obsolescence and lightbulb.

beny23.github.io•105 days ago

Degenerative AI

triptych90.bsky.social•104 days ago

Love

gergely.pragmaticengineer.com•105 days ago

(Companies make less money because it costs $$$ to build and $$ to operate AI functionality. They add this: customers are unwilling to pay for it.

So the company now spends a lot more on a worse product experience!

Make it make sense)

jaredcosulich.bsky.social•105 days ago

I mean they’re all scared of missing the hit product that does work right? I can’t remember when we had such an immature technology that large companies had so much FOMO around (justified or not)

zulqster.bsky.social•105 days ago

Don't forget the $$$ of reputation cost when it misbehaves or is abused.

johnkelly.bsky.social•105 days ago

I’ll admit to a tiny bit of naivety with Apple supposedly being ‘late’ to the AI game. Thought some of the features might have better guardrails than others. genmoji is real dumb and now we’ve got news summaries that get it all wrong. Lovely!

gppeixoto.com•105 days ago

Trying to make sense of it; would be interesting to see if this phenomena happens more on public companies rather than closed ones. Ofc there are several legitimate LLM use cases, but I'd hedge that most of the ~shittified and unprofitable products get released more due to shareholder/board pressure

bockstaller.bsky.social•104 days ago

But now they can report a higher AI revenue, appeasing Investors by keeping the AI scheme running

macavity.bsky.social•104 days ago

Exactly. Why spend all that effort getting money $20 at a time from customers when you can get it $20m at a time from credulous investors?

gergely.pragmaticengineer.com•104 days ago

sadly: yes

goodie03.bsky.social•105 days ago

The company makes less money, but their stock price flat lines while nvidias stock price goes up?

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