Cory Doctorow a science fiction author has coined the term ‘enshittification’, which refers to; how online platforms win over millions of users by providing great service and delighting their users, but once they’ve established their position, they begin to prey on the new market they created.
First, they come for their suppliers and advertisers, but eventually they make services worse and worse for their users in order to extract more profit.
We have all seen this with eCommerce platforms where they initially run in huge losses due to predatory pricing to win the customers and suppliers or freemium model of social media platforms.
We can see similar patterns with AI service providers and AI service aggregators. They are currently in their early phase, offering the services for ‘free’ or really low prices even though millions have been invested in building and training their AI models.
AI regulations are currently focused on Trust, transparency, ethics and privacy of the AI services. Should regulations be covering ‘Enshittification’ too?
Thinking Space 