ChatGPT’s FarmVille Moment

OpenAI is inviting developers in 2024 to build tools that could themselves become lawsuit targets.

FarmVille tapped into Facebook's ethos of networked participation and fit Facebook's algorithmic News Feed like a glove. Zynga, the game's developer, reached a multibillion-dollar valuation based entirely on its ability to create games within platforms that people could not stop playing.

The immediate aim of these entries and others is presumably to persuade users to pay that monthly subscription fee. But the broader project here is more ambitious. OpenAI is trying to turn ChatGPT into a platform.

There are also the managers who spent the past year or so using generative AI to cut costs while sacrificing quality, particularly in the media industry.

Then there are students using ChatGPT to cheat on tests or for help with homework. ChatGPT usage declined in the summer, when kids were out of school, surprising approximately no one

In FarmVille, you were a farmer. Click a button, plant a crop. Click the button again, milk a cow. Send requests to your Facebook friends for help tending your farm. They clicked along, making your farm bigger and filling one another's Facebook feeds with FarmVille activity updates. Sell your crops for in-game currency to buy in-game luxury goods. Or, if you were impatient, you could convert real dollars into in-game currency and buy that FarmVille villa you craved. It was, in many ways, the forerunner to the mobile games that would flood the Apple and Android app stores in the decade that followed

Most of what the developer platform initially enabled were silly games. But those games expanded the range of what the social network was good for. They gave Facebook a built-in advantage over competing sites and made the platform more addictive.

Finally, there are the hobbyists and hype bros, people who just like to play around with ChatGPT because it feels like the future to them, or because they think they smell profit. The same type of Twitter accounts that spent 2021 hawking NFTs—and 2022 crowing about the metaverse—are now all-in on prompt engineering.

ChatGPT is not omniscient. It has neither personality nor perspective. How often do you actually need a computer to produce some fake Shakespeare for you, anyway?

ChatGPT needs its FarmVille. OpenAI is betting that some unknown developer, somewhere, will come up with it.