It's a market where nobody has a particularly deep moat and most players are charging money for a service. Open weight models aren't too far behind proprietary models, particularly for mundane queries. The cost of inference is plummeting and it's already possible to run very good models at pennies per megatoken. I think it's unreasonably pessimistic to assume that dark patterns are an inevitability.

For the sake of argument, none of the typical websites with the patterns described have a moat, and the cost of hosting them has plummeted a while ago. It's not inevitable but it's likely, and they will be darker if they are embedded in the models' output...

> and most players are charging money for a service

The aricle talks about AI overviews. As exemplified by the AI summary at the top of Google search results page. That thing is free.

You do realize of course that every service that now employs all these dark patterns we're complaining about was already profitable and making good money, and that simply isn't good enough? Revenue has to increase quarter-to-quarter otherwise your stock will tank.

It's not simply enough that a product "makes money" it must "make more money, every quarter, forever" which is why everything, not even limited to tech, but every product absolutely BLOWS. It's why every goddamn thing is a subscription now. It's why every fucking website on the internet wants an email and a password so they can have you activate an account, and sell a known active email to their ad partners.