Small hypothesis: I bet people like AI chat interfaces in some part because they are “clean” – simple text, easy to process, consistent visuals, no ads, no pop-ups, etc.
To use a cliche example: Even if it wasn’t in any way “smarter,” it’d still be nicer to ask ChatGPT for a recipe than go to a webpage to read that recipe. Its interface is a natural “reader mode.”
But… that’s not going to last.



miki
in reply to Marcin Wichary • • •I think it very well might, because of the difference in their nature.
Recipe webpages are strictly transactional. Their main purpose is to squeeze as much juice out of you *on this visit* as they can, and they compete in an extremely brutal, low-margin economy against other pages which have the same content and are attempting the same thing. There's 0 brand loyalty, there are no switching costs, if the page falls down in SEO rankings, they'll have 0 revenue after a week. This means that if they already have a customer "hooked", they need to shove as many ads in their face as they can. Next week, that customer won't remember whether the awful domain was online-recipes[.]com or recipesonline[.]us anyway.
Chatbots are different, as most people only use one. That means there's value in keeping the customer hooked, and giving them access to useful info when nobody else will is a great way to do this.
In an AI chatbot, the goals of squeezing as much money out of that customer and keeping that customer for themselves are at odds with eachother, and both of these goals are important.
I don't think they'll stay as pleasant to use as they are, but I also don't think they'll ever get anywhere near as bad as recipe websites.