I think the internet is going to start to stratify into paid and "free" tiers going forward, and honestly it's about goddamned time.

I have no way to verify that.

What I care about is a search engine that's trying its hardest to serve me answers to my searches, rather than feeding me ads.

AI tools today are great for the same reason Google was great in its first few years of existence: they want to attract users and sell this awesome new product. But this will quickly change.

The ad and investor-fueled enshittification will inevitably also come to popular AI tools, but in even more sinister ways than web search results. Forget banners and traditional ad campaigns. Users will start seeing subtle product placements in the responses, and certain brands placed higher than others, all embedded in the friendly conversational tone they're used to, to make them even more susceptible to manipulation. Thanks to the sea of private data users are willing to share with their "personal" AI assistant, the responses will be perfectly fine-tuned so that ads are targeted at them _personally_. Advertisers will no longer need to target broad cohorts who may or may not be interested in their brand. They will be able to reach _exactly_ people who are most likely to make a purchase, especially if the ad is delivered at _exactly_ the right moment when the person is most vulnerable.

The only way to avoid this is to use open source and self-hosted AI tools, but the vast majority of people will use whatever service is popular and "free", same as today.