Putting an untrusted layer of chatbot AI between you and the internet is an obvious disaster waiting to happen

Tom MacWright nails it: LLM results don’t work for you, they work for their makers.

You ask OpenAI for a product recommendation, and it recommends a product that they’re associated with, or one that a company is paying them to promote. Or maybe some company detects OpenAI’s web scraper and delivers customized content to win the recommendation. You just don’t know.

This is obviously going to happen. Google promoted its own products in search. Amazon recommends its own products, eagerly ripping off the branding and terms used by other companies. Microsoft promotes its own AI, Copilot, when you use Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to search for Google’s AI, Gemini. This kind of stuff is not illegal enough to attract enforcement in the US and it’s obviously good for business, so companies do it with gusto, even when it’s totally obvious to everyone.

So in this new world of “AX” — Agent Experience — it’s worth asking: agents for whom?