Zero switching costs? Maybe the way I use AI, where I don’t really need it to know about me and I just ask it knowledge questions. A lot of people seem to be trying to make it a friend who knows everything about them.

> Or users will realize that a trashy ads experience is bad and switch to a service that isn't trashy

AI service can be so sophisticated that most will not notice the manipulation.

Sometimes the big trashy company buys the better rival, and then trashes it.

Edit - just stumbled on this :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

Almost any online service has plenty of competition, but it doesn't prevent enshittification once one of them proves that you can squeeze more revenue out of users and get away with it. Netflix charges you the same as five years ago, but you now get ads. You pay for Amazon Prime and get ads. You pay for Spotify, but they now serve you AI music from fake bands to avoid paying royalties to humans. The end game is that all consumer LLMs have ads in the free / cheap tier.

And as other folks are saying, the whole point is that it's a different type of an ad: it's not an annoying pop-up or an unskippable video. It's a subtle recommendation that you don't even notice. High conversion rates, little fatigue... getter than all the cool characters smoking in films a while back.

> I don't understand why there's so much fearmongering about ads when heavy competition + zero switching costs will effectively guarantee good UX.

I mean literally every other technology sector has gone the other way, but i'm sure this one for reasons will be completely different. I mean of course, it just makes sense.