I have written before about my adventures with AI chatbots which were underwhelming, to put it mildly. Now John Oliver has come up with a detailed look at it, and all its problems. He points out that the companies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on software development and hardware and data centers but have no significant revenue as yet.

The business model for chatbots seems to be to get as many people hooked on using these chatbots as possible by providing people with an experience that they enjoy, mostly for free. Once people get hooked, we can expect the companies to steadily degrade the free experience in order to get users sign up with paid subscriptions for ‘better’ versions, often similar to the one they previously got for free or sometimes with enhanced features. It is the same tactic that has been used over and over again by the tech and internet companies, as Cory Doctorow documents in his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, to lure people in before turning the screws on them.
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