AI AI Captain!

More on the "enshittification" of the real world

One idea I play with from time to time here at this newsletter is this question of whether “things are getting worse” (for example, here, here, and here). I struggle with whether these various little anecdotes and observations really tell a story of some sort of decline, or not. Or if they tell a story at all, really. I don’t know, which is why I collect and publish these little vignettes and am always curious what other folks are seeing in this vein or what they think about them.

I also recently wrote one of my occasional consumer advocacy/anecdote pieces, touching on three things: blind-box collecting, “smart” home goods with end-user license agreements in their terms, and third-party vendors walking the sales floor in big-box home improvement stores.

What all of these have in common, I observed, is that they erode some of the assumptions or expectations we have about commerce—even if those assumptions are not based in consumer law per se—and that they introduce elements to the buying and selling of physical goods which previously have been found mostly in 1) gambling, 2) software/computer program sles, and 3) the internet.

It’s “enshittification,” but in the realm of brick-and-mortar retail and with regard to physical products.

After writing that piece and thinking about that all in general, I’ve noticed a few more examples (not strictly in the brick-and-mortar world). And I’m curious what you make of these things.

Here’s one:

This is eBay prompting me to try and flip random things I’ve bought over the last couple of years. I’m going to turn around and sell my partially used rolls of tape? My $5 screwdriver that lives in a junk drawer? Really? It feels kind of desperate—either eBay desperate to drive listings/sales, or thinking that its own users are that desperate to make some cash (which of course some of them probably are).

But more than that, it’s just…weird. It feels like a level of informality and hustle that I just would not expect from an actual corporation with a reputation. It makes me feel as if the stability we expect is slowly decaying; like nobody is really quite in charge.

On the subject of eBay again, here’s another one. eBay now has a “let AI write your listing!” feature, which, predictably, is not very good. The specific reason it’s a bad idea is because buyers and sellers know what the product is; the pertinent facts are the condition, wear, etc.

Here’s a listing I came across, which since sold (the price is fair enough):

But you would expect a listing description along the lines of, “Consoles do not power on,” or “I don’t have the cables so couldn’t test them, assume they don’t work, maybe you’ll get lucky, no returns,” or “Acquired at an estate sale, condition unknown” or “From a repair shop, unfixable/major issues, for spare parts only.”

Instead, the seller used the AI feature, so we got this for the item description:

Garbled, approximated, almost-right meanings, and poor word-to-information ratio are the things that define AI content generation. And it’s especially useless here, where you just want the seller to either describe a problem with the thing or say “I have no idea, you buy it and find out.” I suppose that’s what this amounts to, but I don’t like it.

Another example is the Amazon Echo’s new AI features. After being offered as an invite-only upgrade, it was pushed to users. I know some folks will say I shouldn’t even have an Amazon Echo, but it was a gift and we use it for music and timers/alarms. Which is basically what it’s good for.¹

The other week it had upgraded itself, with an uncanny, annoying new voice (it’s a poor AI human-like voice, so it sounds almost human, and is distracting; the old voice sounds flat and computer-like, which I much prefer.) In its AI mode, dubbed Alexa+, it also ends every command with some kind of open-ended question or invitation to chat, just like Gemini and ChapGPT do, instead of just doing the thing you ask. For example, I asked it the weather, and after giving the forecast it said something like, “It’s a nice day to stay in with a good book, isn’t it?”

So I said, “Alexa, go back to your old voice,” and it goes (again a bit of a paraphrase), “This is my classic voice—nostalgic and familiar like a warm blanket.” No, no no, no, no. And it was not its old voice—the device was lying, and the old, non-Alexa+ voice had to be restored by disabling the whole AI upgrade, which at least was possible, even though you have to issue a specific command.

This is not just mere annoyance; here’s a Reddit comment about how the upgrade can mess up routines that were set up with the original Alexa:

These things feel like parodies of capitalism from a midcentury sci-fi story, or something like that. On some level, I feel naive or entitled expecting corporations to act any differently. But I suppose they would if they feel they have to, and I want them to feel like they have to.

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Related Reading:

The Risk Of Error

Whose Side Are You On?

You Never Know How It Falls Apart

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1. Less so with music than it used to be—it now sometimes locks your ability to play more than a couple of songs from a single artist before it will prompt you to upgrade, and more music than before is completely inaccessible without an upgrade.

This and the bit I’m about to describe remind you that you don’t own the product that Amazon Echo is; in a way it isn’t really even a product. You “own” the physical device itself, but the device does nothing without Amazon’s software, and what Amazon tells the thing to do is completely outside of your control and subject to their revision or termination at any time.