Chattification: The Default Adoption of Conversational Interfaces in the Age of Generative AI

Since the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022, a growing number of software products have added a text-based chat interface as their primary or default way of accessing AI capabilities. This short position paper names and defines that pattern as chattification: the tendency to incorporate a conversational text interface as the default interaction layer of a product, independent of whether conversation is the appropriate modality for the task. We distinguish chattification from the deliberate use of chat, identify three drivers behind it (imitation, fear of missing out, and the genuine effectiveness of intent capture), and describe the recurring usability costs it introduces. We argue that chat is neither the future of all interfaces nor a terrible interface, and that the useful question for designers is not whether to add chat but whether chat is the right modality for a given task. We close with a short set of questions for evaluating that.