Perplexity Enshitification

Perplexity is a tool that I’ve mentioned before. It is a lot of things, but in general, it’s a search engine that uses several different AI models to understand what you’re asking and essentially research what you’re looking for, providing source links, and so forth. I really liked it, though I’ve stopped using it since others have gotten close enough in functionality that I can’t justify paying for another tool…

Unfortunately, it looks like Perplexity is headed straight in to Enshitification - Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads.

Social media and search have been hyper catalysts for surveilance marketing, which I don’t think is hard to argue is the source of many large global problems today. They won’t stop because it is a firehose of money, either. One of the things I’m most worried about with AI is that it will make the surveilance advertising we have today seem quaint in comparison. There are many scary scenarios that could result from this. And of course they are going to do it, it’s essentially infinite money, and we are unable to create functional laws to stop them.