ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ads in your ChatGPT in 2030. The good news is you're still going to have a job in 2030.

> we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.

There is a severe disjoint between these two statements: the advertiser now knows what your conversation was about! This gives a lot of leverage to ad campaigns to design the targeting criteria very specifically crafted to identify the exact behavioral and interest segments they want.

Edit: they made sure to use the word "trust" 5 times because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are.

Are they mincing words here? By selling your data they mean they'll never package the raw chats and send them whoever is buying ads. Ok, neither does Google. But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? "See this is not your data, it's just preference bits".

This single sentence probably took so many man-hours. I completely understand why they’re trying to integrate ads but this feels like a generational run for a company founded with the purpose of safely researching superintelligence.

That's how all the major ads platforms work. I don't personally agree that it constitutes "selling your data" but certainly people describe it that way for Google/Meta ads which function the same way. By framing it this way they're clearly trying to fool users who really bought into the messaging that Google et al literally sell user data when they only provide targeting. I guess the hope is that the cleaner reputation of OpenAI will mean people think there's some actual difference here.

I've heard this before from other companies.

OpenAI should just reject all advertisements. That's the only real solution.

Maybe OpenAI does things different, but as soon as an OKR around ad performance gets committed to, the experience will degrade. Sure they're not selling data, however they'll almost certainly have a direct response communication where advertisers tell Open AI what and when youve interacted with their products. Ads will be placed and displayed in increasingly more aggressive positions, although it'll start out non intrusive.

Im curious how their targeting will work and how much control they'll give advertisers to start. Will they allow businesses of all sizes? Will they allow advertisers to control how their ads work? I bet Amazon is foaming at the mouth to get their products fed into chat gpt results.

I've heard this before...

The free and $8 new “Go” tier will include ads.

> And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall

We shall be good. Pinky promise.

The next step is to have them natively in the output. And it'll happen at a scale never seen.

Google had a lot more push-back, because they used to be the entity that linked to other websites, so them showing the AI interview was a change of path.

OpenAI embedding the advertisements in a natural way is much much easier for them. The public already expects links to products when they ask for advice, so why not change the text a little bit to glorify a product when you're asking for a comparison between product A & B.

Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely), they are under immense immediate financial pressure to produce revenue (I presume most likely) or there is simply no development on the horizon big enough to justify the shift - so just do it now.

So ChatGPT constantly ending all responses with tangents and followups is not for engagement?

When first trying 5.2, on a "Pro" plan, I was - and still am - able to trigger the shopping assistant via keyword-matching, even if the conversation context, or the prompt itself, is wildly inappropriate (suicide, racism, etc).

Keyword-matching seems a strange ad strategy for a (non-profit) company selling QKV. It's all very confusing!

Hopefully, for fans of personal super-assistants--and advertising--worldwide, this will improve now that ads have been formalised.

> we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay

No, that is not why they're doing it. They're doing it to make money.

> Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity

No, that is not their mission. Their mission is to make money.

If they wanted to benefit all humanity they would axe the entire operation, do a complete 180, and use all their money to fight as hard as they can against everyone else who is doing what they're doing now.

Of course they are going to "anonymise" the chats, and only extract keywords summaries.

But, as some people are generally more candid with chatbots, de-anonymisation through keyword selection is trivially possible.

It won't just stay at ultra precise demographic selection (ie all males 35-40, living in london, worried about hair loss). They will offer scenarios that facebook/instagram could only infer/dream of

"middle aged woman with disposable income unhappy with spouse."

Where it gets interesting is how they will provide proof that the advert has landed/reached eyeballs.

(I continue to be shocked how many people—who should know better—are in denial that the entire "industry" of Generative AI is completely and utterly unsustainable and furthermore on a level of unsustainability we've never before seen in the history of computer technology.)

I guess in the meantime, they will be able to use chat histories to personalize ads on a whole new level. I bet we will see some screenshots of uncomfortably relevant ads in the coming months.

From an ethical standpoint, I think it's .. murky. Not ads themselves, but because the AI is, at least partially, likely trained on data scraped from the web, which is then more or less regurgitated (in a personalized way) and then presented with ads that do not pay the original content creators. So it's kind of like, lets consume what other people created, repackage it, and then profit off of it.

They didn’t even start with free, already a paid subscription included.

Also, anything that benefits OpenAI or keeps our runway just a bit longer is (by definition) in support of our mission, so we can do anything that we want and say that it is for the good of humanity.

This means little. Anyone that has your data could potentially feed it in to do their own task.

The same sleight of hand that’s been used by surveillance capitalists for years. It’s not about “selling your data” because they have narrowly defined data to mean “the actual chats you have” and not “information we infer about you from your usage of the service,” which they do sell to advertisers in the form of your behavioral futures.

Fuck all this. OpenAI caved to surveillance capitalism in record time.

so, google would appear to have boxed out openai from the #1 use case, and already have all the pieces in place to monetize it. This move by OAI isnt surprising, but is it too late to matter?

What you’re reacting to isn’t just “ads.” It’s the feeling of: Someone monetizing the collective output of human thought while quietly severing the link back to the humans who produced it.

That triggers a very old and very valid moral instinct.

Why “sleazy” is an accurate word here

“Sleazy” usually means: technically allowed strategically clever morally evasive

I'm out.

I mean, they certainly know that introducing ads with be a huge motivation for consumers to seek other options.

The primary differentiator of OpenAI is first mover advantage; the product itself is not particularly unique anymore.

IMHO consumers will quickly realize that switching to an alternative AI provider is easy and probably fun.

This seems premature to give up their moat in the name of revenue. Are they feeling real financial pressure all of the sudden? Maybe I'm missing something. Looks like a big win for Google and Anthropic.

More related, I pay for Kagi, because google results are horrible.

More related, Chatgpt isn't the only model out there, and I've just recently stopped using 5 because it's just slow and there are other models that come back and work just as well. So when Chatgpt starts injecting crap, I'll just stop using them for something else.

What would you do if every time you walked into Walmart and the greeter spit in your face and told you to go F yourself, would you still shop there?

The whole company is built on lies and deception.

Big G will crush them. No "ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity." Just doing a desperate money grab.

What I'm not okay with is being served adds using codex cli, or codex cli gather data outside of my context to send to advertisers. So as long as they're not doing that, I won't complain.

If they start doing that, I'll complain, and I'll need to more heavily sandbox it.

If no services remain I’ll run one of my own in the cloud or my server.

Fuck. Ads.