Plagued by AI

Companies seem plagued with a desperate need to enshittify every one of their products with AI right now. 

I’m pretty detached from the corporate world these days but I’m curious to know where this is being driven from. What’s the root cause? Is it CEOs and boards demanding to be onboard “the AI train” lest they miss out? Is it product managers trying to feature-fight their way out of a competitor one-upmanship contest, or maybe it’s those pesky engineers who’ve got hold of this new hammer and by golly they’re going to use it, goddamit!

I don’t know. Either way, it’s inescapable. 

Here’s an example from WhatsApp. I wanted to find an old chat so I clicked on the search box at the top only to find that search is now playing second fiddle to “Ask Meta AI”. 

I’m presented with canned questions from the banal “Help me with gift ideas” to the actually terrifying “I need parenting advice”. People are really doing this? 

I can still type “Fussball” to find my group chat (for now), but I also have to contribute to climate change as Meta fires up the GPUs to present me with this nonsense in the search results:

   

Gergely Orosz tweeted today that “it’s cringe”. He’s so right, I mean look at this AI-savaged, Workday word-cabbage of a statement he points to:

Like Apple Intelligence or AI washing machines, WhatsApp and Workday are two more examples of the technofusion singularity of enshittification which shows no sign of stopping. I’m still counting on it just being a phase. It has to be, right? 

RIGHT??!

We’re already seeing signs of AI fatigue so I’m confident this bubble will pop. And then – just maybe – everyone will calm down and re-focus back to solving real world problems, not creating them.