From free convenience to metered intelligence

The evolution of chatbots over the past decade reads less like a steady march of innovation and more like a cautionary tale about how quickly convenience can turn into dependency, and then into cost. In the early days, conversational AI felt like a small miracle: tools that could write, summarize, translate, and brainstorm at no apparent cost. For many, it seemed like getting “a good job for nothing,” a digital assistant that never slept and rarely complained. This first phase was defined by abundance.

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