Most of AI usage could be easily (with a little bit of effort) replaced by just searching for the info you need, but those days search results are so poor that asking AI gets so advantageous for the average user (that don’t care / don’t know about privacy and other costs and risks that come with it)
Do you think they did it on purpose?
Ai is the DRM for scraping data. Now that these giant ai companies have consumed and scrapped all the data on the internet they need to assure no one else can.
And they have influence to buy exclusive rights to these api calls.
Thats why we can’t have third party apps on reddit anymore.