3 ms·

It's a desperate attempt at staying relevant, even if most of those companies don't realize it yet. Because of its general-purpose nature, AI subsumes products.

by TeMPOraL 10mo ago

It's a desperate attempt at staying relevant, even if most of those companies don't realize it yet. Because of its general-purpose nature, AI subsumes products. Most software products that try to "implement AI in every corner" would, from the user's POV, be more useful if they became tools for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. People's goals are rarely limited to just one software product, and products are basically defined as a bag of tools glued with UI, that work together but don't interoperate much with anything else. That boundary drawn around a bunch of software utilities, is given a name and a fancy logo, and sold or used to charge people rent. That's software products. But LLMs want to flip that around - they're good at gluing things, so embedding one within a product is just a waste of model capabilities, and actually makes the product boundary more apparent and annoying. Or in short: consider Copilot in Microsoft Word, vs. "Generate Word Document" plugin/tool for a general LLM interface (whether Gemini webapp or Claude Code or something like TypingMind). The former is just an LLM locked in a box, barely able to output some text without refusing or claiming it can't do it. The latter is a general-purpose tool that can search the web for you, scrap some sites and run data analysis on results (writing its own code for this), talk results over with you, cross-reference with other sources, and then generate you a pretty Word document with formatting and images. This is, btw., a real example. I used a Word document generator with TypingMind and GPT-4 via API, and it was more usable over a year ago than Copilot is even now. Partly because Copilot is just broken, but mostly because the LLM can do lots of things other than writing text in Word. Point being, AI is eroding the notion of software product as something you sell/rent, which threatens just about the entire software industry :).

PaulHoule 10mo ago
AI is the first path out of enshittification the industry has had in a while. See https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-bans-illicit-automated-shopping-amid-rapid-rise-of-ai-agents/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-... It will be funny to see the rapid about face.
- Terr_ 10mo 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.
  - TeMPOraL 10mo ago
    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.
    - Terr_ 10mo ago
      > 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.
mark_l_watson 10mo ago
I have been enjoying reading this thread, but with some irony: sure the email spams pushing their Lumo LLM private chatbot were a mistake, and I bet they stop doing that fast. The irony is that Lumo is a separate product, not really tied to the rest of their products except for a common login. Lumo works fine for the simple quality of life search and question answering stuff. Off topic, but have you tried avoiding the big corporate LLM providers and run local models? The small models just keep getting better and I find it fun and satisfying to do as much as I can locally.

PaulHoule 10mo ago

AI is the first path out of enshittification the industry has had in a while. See https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-bans-illicit-automated-shopping-amid-rapid-rise-of-ai-agents/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-... It will be funny to see the rapid about face.

Terr_ 10mo 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.
- TeMPOraL 10mo ago
  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.
  - Terr_ 10mo ago
    > 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.

mark_l_watson 10mo ago

I have been enjoying reading this thread, but with some irony: sure the email spams pushing their Lumo LLM private chatbot were a mistake, and I bet they stop doing that fast. The irony is that Lumo is a separate product, not really tied to the rest of their products except for a common login. Lumo works fine for the simple quality of life search and question answering stuff. Off topic, but have you tried avoiding the big corporate LLM providers and run local models? The small models just keep getting better and I find it fun and satisfying to do as much as I can locally.