And yet most of the people I know, including many technical ones, default to Cha...

afavour · 2025-11-29T14:20:08 1764426008

> ChatGPT has become the Bandaid or Kleenex of AI

I agree but how many consumers actively purchase Bandaid or Kleenex over cheaper store brands? Becoming a generic term doesn’t always translate to great business. “I’ll put it into chat” could easily end up meaning “enter into Google’s AI prompt” for many people.

array_key_first · 2025-11-29T15:45:23 1764431123

Bandaid and Kleenex are commodities. Nobody has a problem using a different, cheaper tissue brand and calling it Kleenex.

Consumers like chat, not chatGPT. Does it do a chat thing? Good enough for consumers. They'll probably call it chatgpt too.

ethmarks · 2025-11-29T14:16:01 1764425761

Fun fact: that's called a generic trademark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

Y_Y · 2025-11-29T14:28:55 1764426535

When you call your product "(Chat) Generative Pretrained Transformer" then I don't think you have a great defense against genericisation.

The legal history of these is interesting, lots of household names have lost their trademarks, and lots of seemingly generic names are still trademarked. This way to the rabbit hole -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

kccqzy · 2025-11-29T15:05:46 1764428746

OpenAI does worse than that. It tried to make GPT a trademark but USPTO rejected it. So it’s not even a trademark let alone a generic trademark.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97733259&docI...