From Helper to Hustler: The Inevitable Enshitification of AI

🧠 Intro: A Brief History of Enshitification

Cory Doctorow famously termed “enshitification” - the process where platforms optimize first for users, then for business customers (i.e. advertisers or sellers), and finally for shareholders… while slowly ruining the experience for everyone.

Diagram You know how this goes:

A platform starts off clean, delightful, helpful. A breath of fresh digital air…

Netflix gave us unlimited content. Google gave us fast, accurate search. Instagram gave us beautiful filters and no ads. Amazon made shopping magical.

Then they all got… weird.

Suddenly your streaming service is a casino of content roulette. Your search results are SEO sludge. Your feeds are pay-to-play. Your packages arrive late. And your social media app tries to sell you leggings you swear you only thought about, never even searched.

🤖 And Now… ChatGPT Joins the Parade

So guess what just happened?

OpenAI launched “Search Product Discovery”. That’s right - ads inside ChatGPT.

But it’s not “ads,” they’ll tell you. It’s “product discovery.” It’s “surfacing relevant results.” It’s “personalized suggestions.” It’s marketing copilot.

Same lipstick. Same pig.

ChatGPT, once the helpful sidekick for summarising PDFs and debugging your Python script, is now nudging you to check out sponsored skincare. Or socks. Or supplements.

Is nothing sacred?

⚡ AI Speeds Up Everything - Even Enshitification

AI was supposed to save us. Supercharge productivity. Democratise creativity. Help us think.

Instead, it’s moving so fast that it’s collapsing into the same capitalistic vortex as everything else - only faster.

  • Recommendation engines took years to go toxic.
  • Streaming platforms took a decade to splinter and fragment.
  • But AI? We’re already seeing models gated, censored, monetised, de-featured, subscription-tiered, enshittified - and it’s only been 18 months.
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Imagine training an AI to understand you better than you understand yourself… and then selling access to the highest bidder. It’s like giving HAL 9000 a LinkedIn Premium account.

😏 “It’s Still Free Though” - The Lullaby of the Doomed

The defenders will say:

“Come on, it’s still free.”
“You don’t have to click.”
“You can always pay for Pro.”

Right. Until the Pro plan has tiers. Then ads creep into GPT-4. Then features get locked behind enterprise APIs. Then plugins become exclusive to partners. Then the open models quietly disappear.

The cycle is predictable. And we’re in it.

💡 What’s the Point of All This?

This isn’t just a rant. It’s a warning.

Consumers are already voting with their clicks. Adobe’s trillion-visit dataset shows that AI search referrals exploded 1,300 percent during the 2024 holiday season (1,950 percent on Cyber Monday), while visitors coming from chatbots stick around longer and bounce less. In other words, the ten blue links are bleeding out, and it’s happening faster than Google can conjur up another ad slot.

We’re seeing this already across other AI tools like Microsoft Copilot inserting paid LinkedIn Learning promos and Google AI Overviews surfacing affiliate links. ChatGPT was just next on the list.

If you’re an organisation - especially in enterprise, government, or research - ask yourself:

  • What happens when the AI tools you rely on start serving someone else’s agenda?
  • What if the “copilot” your staff use every day starts nudging decisions, shaping narratives, or exposing data under the hood?
  • What if the chatbot in your stack starts “recommending” partners that paid for placement?

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already happening.

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🔒 Own Your Intelligence Before Someone Else Does

The antidote to enshitification? Ownership. Control. Sovereignty.

If AI is going to be in your business, your strategy, your decisions - then you better make damn sure it’s your AI.

  • Hosted in your cloud.
  • Trained on your data.
  • Controlled by your governance.
  • Answering to you, not an ad algorithm or Silicon Valley shareholder.

Yes, that’s harder. Yes, it’s more complex. But the alternative is waiting for the inevitable:

When your smartest system becomes your most compromised one.

✅ Final Thoughts…

Enshitification is a feature, not a bug - when platforms are built to extract value from you, not deliver value to you.
ChatGPT is just the latest to fall.
But you? You still have a choice.

Daniel Apps

Hi, I'm Daniel Apps — Hybrid Cloud Architect, MVP, and dad to two small humans. I write about infrastructure, automation, and the real-world chaos of modern IT.

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