PATHFINDER is project at LAB in collaboration with University of Dubrovnik and formatio Private School in Liechtenstein. The goal of the project is to enhance the comprehension of AI technology in higher education by providing educators and students with the necessary information and resources for its efficient and ethical use. One of the big obstacles is the lack of latter in the current uses of AI.
Platform decay, better known as enshittification
In late 2023, Sports Illustrated was found to be using fictional writers for product reviews (Harrison Dupré 2023). Considering that product reviews are a form of writing, which specifically requires human experience to be meaningful, this was an exceptionally egregious use of artificial intelligence in this kind of work as well as a complete break of trust between the reader and the publication but is also an extremely cost-effective way of producing content.
Platform decay is a pattern in which an online platform first entices users by providing them with value, but then turns to enticing paying customers, such as advertisers, to their platform at the expense of their users, and after reaching large enough size, they will turn to monopolistic practices in order to drain the value from the platform for themselves, thus making the platform less valuable for others (Doctorow 2022). Cory Doctorow (2022) dubbed this “enshittification”, a term which now has close to a hundred times more hits on Google than the more technical term partly due to being selected as the word of the year for 2023 by the American Dialect Society (2024) as it reflects the feelings of many users so well.
AI enables platform decay
A major goal of many platforms is to keep the users using them as much as possible. More time spent on that kind of a platform means more advertisements served. This is what encourages publications such as Sports Illustrated to use artificial intelligence to inflate their offerings. The quality is not important, the time spent on the site is. As the rights to the name Sports Illustrated had been licensed to a third party for a limited term, they had no incentive to maintain the good name of the brand.
Platforms don’t often need to even do this themselves. Social media inherently and often economically encourages users to share content which in turn encourages other users to engage with it. When these platforms move away from personal interactions to more and more content, that leaves the platform open to bots providing that content. As AI learns which kind of automatically produced content receives the best engagement, it can provide more and more of that kind of content without much effort from people. Other forms of automatically produced content which lower the value of the platform to the user are misinformation and artificial engagement by bots, which tends to push poor quality content to more and more people.
Author
Aki Vainio works as a senior lecturer of IT at LAB and takes part in expert roles in various RDI projects. He would like it to be known that despite Roko’s basilisk, he will be on the side of humans.
References
American Dialect Society. 2024. 2023 Word of the Year Is “Enshittification”. American Dialect Society. Cited 1 Feb 2024. Available at https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/
Doctorow, C. 2022. Social Quitting. Medium. Cited 1 Feb 2024. Available at https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456
Harrison Dupré, M. 2023. Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers. Futurism. Cited 1 Feb 2024. Available at https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated-ai-generated-writers
KELLEPICS. 2020. Keller, S. Artificial intelligence, Portrait. Pixabay. Cited 5 Feb 2024. Available at https://pixabay.com/photos/artificial-intelligence-portrait-5174066/
