AI is the New Airbnb

Airbnb is a fantastic idea on paper -- a global marketplace for homestays, experiences, and local services that you can book right from your phone. You can even rent out your own apartment while away to earn some extra cash. I mean, who would be against that?

I still have an Airbnb account and used it occasionally, but not anymore -- because, as with most tech startups, the fun “fuck around” stage is always followed by the inevitable “find out.”

When the company decided it needed to show growth and make more money, Airbnb’s service and cleaning fees shot up so high that people, myself included, started preferring hotels instead. And who wouldn’t? With Airbnb, you pay more, still have to clean the place yourself, and there’s always the chance of a hidden camera somewhere.

It also turned out that when people can rent out their apartments on Airbnb for more money, they’re not exactly eager to lease them long-term -- which only fuels the global housing crisis and drives up the cost of living. And the list of controversies doesn’t end there.

All in all, Airbnb made travel a little more convenient for a little while, made the rich richer, and somehow managed to make the world worse along the way.

And this brings me to AI, even though I oppose that name.

As with Airbnb, we’re still in the fun “fuck around” stage: money is flowing, data is being scraped, deepfakes are being made (now on video!), and Microsoft is busy injecting it into every corner of Windows.

But the “find out” stage is just around the corner, and there are already plenty of signs of the long-term effects it’s bringing. For instance, Wikipedia, one of humanity’s greatest internet inventions, is reporting a dangerous decline in human visitors due to generative AI. OpenAI released a statement about Martin Luther King Jr. Sora generations, and Sam Altman promised to allow erotica in ChatGPT. And that’s just this week’s news. 

Isn’t it ironic how quickly the narrative shifted from AGI and reshaping civil society to sexting for profit?

So I’m calling it now: AI will make a few things more convenient, make the rich even richer, but in the end, we’ll all be worse off because of it.