Yeah. I definitely think LLMs are cool and are useful — they don't just appear that way because everything else happened to be enshittified when they came on the scene — but I've definitely been pondering the fact that we're likely in a part of the cycle right before enshittification sets in. Because it is very possible to monetize AI — the badness of the token economics has been greatly exaggerated, and with huge MAU numbers there's a lot of opportunity — but most of those MAUs won't pay a monthly subscription with caps and rate limits like prosumers will, so the obvious way to monetize is with ads and manipulation.

Agreed that LLMs don't become extractive on their own. Companies just choose that path when opacity is more profitable than usefulness.