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Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

• Madmallard 11mo ago
  RIP their stock price once that’s live Probably can make a ton of money shorting that
  • nothrabannosir 11mo ago
    Would love to know your reasoning because when I look at SPY there’s quite a few ad companies in there, and heavily weighted, too. Why would Wall Street love ads on them but hate it on openai?
    • fwip 11mo ago
      One reason is that it means "general AI" is likely farther away. If it were close, they wouldn't need to spend resources on sucking pennies from their free users.
      • jennyholzer 11mo ago
        "general AI" is a lie. if you believe in "general AI", you are a sucker. if you believe in "general AI", you have been conned. Welcome to America.
        • fwip 11mo ago
          I think you're right, but the people investing in AI seem to believe otherwise.
  • lpapez 11mo ago
    Surely you realize that OpenAI is not a publicly traded company?
    • Madmallard 11mo ago
      nope RIP me
  • slig 11mo ago
    Yeah, just look at Meta and Alphabet and how the market absolutely hates that they make a shit ton of money with ads.
    • rhetocj23 11mo ago
      [dead]
• Aeolun 11mo ago
  Well, better hope Anthropic isn’t in on it.
  • vanschelven 11mo ago
    It's a pretty big part of their public image not to be but the fear is real
• moralestapia 11mo ago
  This isn't a leak or a surprise. This already happened a while ago with specific shopping queries.
• digitalsushi 11mo ago
  Wow, ads and smut in the same month? Cory Doctorow will have to invent a new term for this. Wait, he did 3 years ago, we can reuse it.
  • LadyCailin 11mo ago
    I don’t think adults acknowledging that humans are sexual beings is even remotely enshittification. Shoving ads in everything is tho.
    • jennyholzer 11mo ago
      human sexual reproduction is evil and must be repressed edit: all hail our corporate overlords
  • zamadatix 11mo ago
    The smut portion would have been enshittification if it happened in the other direction. Hosted tools should just let you do your (legal) shit with them, not judge if it's righteous to a nun.
• everdrive 11mo ago
  This outcome was obvious. If you really let yourself rely on an LLM, it will steer you towards what its owners want; products and services provided by advertisers, the "right" social and moral values, etc. It will even "accidentally" steer you towards its own inflections and ways of thinking. This is one isn't overtly malicious, but is still insidious. Do these companies get to standardize thinking and speaking just so they can get ahead of a technology race?
  • sph 11mo ago
    Brainwashing at a scale never seen before.
    • walthamstow 11mo ago
      It's nowhere near social media scale yet.
      • marliechiller 11mo ago
        Id argue its already even greater. The amount of botting and astroturfing happening now means that a good chunk of the content people are consuming on those social media sites is generated by LLMs. Social media is the vector, but its the content thats the virus and OpenAI et al control what that virus contains
        • walthamstow 11mo ago
          That's a really good point. Even if social media is and remains the medium over chat assistant apps (likely imo), all the content everywhere will be AI slop.
      • insane_dreamer 11mo ago
        In many ways it's worse, because with social media you know -- or think you know -- the source, and you use that to judge accordingly how open you are to what you're reading or how much you trust its veracity, or what biases it might have. Whereas with LLMs most people inherently trust because the LLM is supposedly objective and unbiased.
• roger10-4 11mo ago
  Not at all surprising. Google, Meta and many others have made billions selling an ads - I’m sure OpenAI wants a piece of that pie.
• jmkni 11mo ago
  I guess this could also have a knock-on effect, in that ChatGPT will steer it's users away from topics advertisers might find distasteful Like it might not want to tell you about negative health effects from McDonalds, if McDonalds becomes a major source of ad revenue
  • ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago
    In the 1980s, the American Heart Association listed many contributors to heart disease. A missing one: smoking. At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA. They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.
    • RobotToaster 11mo ago
      "friends of the earth" was originally funded by the oil CEO Robert Anderson to oppose nuclear power.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago
        The invention of the "Type A personality" had similar roots. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3036703/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3036703/
      • muglug 11mo ago
        This claim is meritless — FOE’s wiki talk page has a comment at the end debunking the accusation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Friends_of_the_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Friends_of_the_Earth
    • bonsai_spool 11mo ago
      > In the 1980s, the American Heart Association listed many contributors to heart disease. > A missing one: smoking. > At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA. > They now list tobacco as a big risk factor. https://www.heart.org/en/bold-hearts-the-centennial/100-years-of-impact https://www.heart.org/en/bold-hearts-the-centennial/100-year... Taking on tobacco was no small task at mid-century, when more than half of men and a third of women smoked. In 1956, the AHA’s first scientific statement on smoking concluded that more evidence was needed to link it to heart disease. But as evidence grew, so did our role. Even before the landmark Surgeon General’s report of 1964, we called for a public campaign against smoking. By 1971, we said cigarette smoking “contributed significantly” to coronary heart disease, and in 1977, we declared smoking to be the most preventable cause of heart disease. In the 1980s, with significant support from the AHA, new laws required stronger warning labels for cigarettes and banned smoking on airplanes. Today, we’re working to understand the risks of e-cigarettes and vaping while fighting to keep teens and others from starting.
• 01284a7e 11mo ago
  Free, and open source models. Now and forever.
  • justonceokay 11mo ago
    What is a free model worth if it’s running on another company’s server farm, trained with data you do not have access to?
    • Gracana 11mo ago
      That is literally the thing the parent poster wants to avoid by running open models. [edit] I was a little unfair -- lack of access to training data is a bit of an issue (perhaps moreso for analysis than for for actual use, considering what it takes to train these models). I'm thankful that some of them are also distributed as base models, which should be relatively unbiased compared to what happens later during finetuning.
      • GCUMstlyHarmls 11mo ago
        Run them on what though?
        • Gracana 11mo ago
          Three power supplies, an old server, a grocery cart and a box fan, and every 3090 you and your friends can get your hands on.
    • boppo1 11mo ago
      I want models I can run on my machine.
  • sipjca 11mo ago
    I agree, but what about the training data that goes into it (intentional poisoning of the training data, for a variety of reasons, $, power, etc.)
  • 11mo ago
• la_fayette 11mo ago
  It is no surprise, somehow they need to earn money. It will be interesting though how much the response of the LLM will be adapted. At least legally advertisement need to be marked for users. So either the response of an LLM will be extended with ad content or replaced by ad content.
  • eric-burel 11mo ago
    I am pretty sure you can figure massive loopholes like how it's legal to train the model on stolen data but not to steal data etc. For instance advertisers can push model benchmarks that favours some opinions, based on a biased selection of research papers. I think we've only seen the beginnings of what intricate business models can be figured for an AI company, it's much more convoluted than a search engine or even a social network.
  • makeitdouble 11mo ago
    > It is no surprise, somehow they need to earn money I kinda hate that a move needs to be surprising to be noteworthy or critiqued. If tomorrow Meta leaks all data of all users I really wish the reactions aren't "not surprised" and instead "hang them and tar them". Same way, the need to earn money shouldn't be an excuse for whatever a company does. I'd be a lot more interested in knowing if/why you think it will be a net positive for society and why it should be left to happen.
    • la_fayette 11mo ago
      I don't get your point here. User targeted ads are the main business model of the internet? Yes, few days ago it was revealed how billions of user data points could be gathered from Meta [1], did anybody care, outside a small privacy community? So indead these things are not surprising... My thoughts don't go so far to consider the effects on society, idk, do you? [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/3-5-Billion-Accounts-Complete-WhatsApp-Directory-Retrieved-and-Evaluated-11083244.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/3-5-Billion-Accounts-Complete-W...
      • makeitdouble 11mo ago
• aurareturn 11mo ago
  - ~1 billion users in just 3 years - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products - Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are) - An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative digital ad business is in an existential threat. I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT. All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due to worse unit economics or run out of funding. PS. Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024. Zero revenue from non-sub users. What do you guys think their revenue will end up in 2026?
  • Andrex 11mo ago
    Spinning up an all-new ad network is pretty tough. I would think OpenAI would need to beat Meta/Google on basics like CPM in order for the network effects to make it desirable for ad vendors over Meta/Google. Ad budgets are fixed and zero-sum and vendors (in my head, I don't know) would prefer to spend their money on the best network giving the best results. I don't know if ads in LLM chats can get there.
    • rs186 11mo ago
      If Apple can build an ad system within the app store, I don't see why OpenAI can't do that for ChatGPT.
      • chroma205 10mo ago
        > If Apple can build an ad system within the app store, I don't see why OpenAI can't do that for ChatGPT. Because Apple iPhone users have no alternative. But Google Gemini is right there for Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Workspace users.
    • kavrick 11mo ago
      Microsoft owns a big chunk of them and already has a big network. Why not just use theirs?
• mohsen1 11mo ago
  Can you imagine how annoying ads in the voice interface would look like? Ugh
  • vntok 11mo ago
    You'd most probably wouldn't be able to tell for sure. Ads will be subtle and flow as background music to the onversation. Talking to the AI while on your daily commute will make you thirsty for some sort of hot beverage while ChatGPT tells you all about sirens in Greek mythology.
    • kaffekaka 11mo ago
      But why the hell would I want to talk to the AI while on my daily commute? Do people do that?
      • bentcorner 11mo ago
        I think a lot of techies would be surprised with how much some users embrace their products. We see and know the man behind the curtain, other people believe in the magic.
      • expensive_news 11mo ago
        Idk how popular it is but I know at least one person that does that. I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets more normal in the coming years.
      • i3oi3 11mo ago
        You bet I do. That's an hour of rubber-ducky time working through new architectures with someone who won't get tired of my endless blathering. I've worked through a bunch of bad ideas that way, without embarrassing myself in front of my colleagues. I also use it to explore topics that I wouldn't spend desktop time on, but that I was curious about. It's like having a buddy who's smarter than me on their special interest, but their special interest is "everything you don't know.". And your buddy's name is Gell-Mann. : - ) It beats passively listening to the radio.
• eric-burel 11mo ago
  "that could redefine the web economy" I don't think that ads in ChatGPT are that disruptive, it's just another channel. I think ChatGPT apps are an order magnitude more game changing, as they are not a new markting channel but a new distribution channel for software. Your next ad will still be an ad, but your next SaaS might be a ChatGPT App.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• Workaccount2 11mo ago
  If you're not paying for a product (the full price), then you are the product. If you're not paying for the product, and you aren't the product, you're in the start-up phase and just eating the bait. And man, people have been eating a lot of bait.
  • JKCalhoun 11mo ago
    These days it's no surprise when you are both paying for the product and are the product as well. A lot of us learned this when cable television arrived—you paid for it, but no commercials…until there were.
    • Workaccount2 11mo ago
      It's true, but many services nowadays (if not most) offer an ad-free service at full price. People confuse "ad-subsidized" with "I pay and still see ads". They're not the same thing. And market studies show that people overwhelmingly prefer ads over payments.
      • knollimar 11mo ago
        Do market studies show that people prefer ad subsidized with payments over payments?
        • keeda 11mo ago
          Not sure about market studies, but I don't think the data is going to be very encouraging for this case either. E.g. in early 2024 Amazon introduced ads in Prime Video, which people were already paying for. I couldn't find more recent data, but from this source at least it seems growth hasn't stalled much: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/amazon-prime-video-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/amazon-prime-video-stati... This is not a clear cut example because Prime comes with a lot of other benefits which is a confounding factor. Might be worth looking at cable TV subscription numbers after they introduced ads, but I couldn't find any data with a quick search.
      • 10mo ago
• bpt3 11mo ago
  Serving ads is a great business when your related expenses are low. I'm not sure how it'll work out when your computing expenses are much higher. It certainly won't make them profitable using traditional models.
  • mrweasel 11mo ago
    I might be completely wrong, but I doubt that OpenAI can sell enough ad space to cover their cost. Maybe their clicks will be more valuable and that will help. Still I see this as a pretty desperate act. Google and Meta also makes their living of ads, but they've cranked that nob so hard, to please the shareholders, that their product is now suffering. If OpenAI does the same, they could easily crash as fast as they've grown. Complete boom and bust cycle in less than a decade.
    • bpt3 11mo ago
      I think they're going to try to charge a premium for ads because of all the context and personalized knowledge they have, but I don't think they actually have any more relevant information than Google in practice.
• JadoJodo 11mo ago
  Now we just have to wait and see whether it’s… “I’d be happy to answer your question… right after a word from our sponsor: Xyeniceli. Side effects may include ...” OR ChatGPT: “Why don't you let me fix you some of this Mococoa drink? All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners.” User: “What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?” ChatGPT: “I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.”
  • coffeebeqn 11mo ago
    I think it’ll be more like. “Find me a tire shop within 10 miles” - “oh my goodness I just happen to have just the place for you with a special coupon CHAT25 for 25% off your first service”
    • brazukadev 11mo ago
      Only to find the price to be 25% more expensive
  • aranelsurion 11mo ago
    I wish it'd be so obvious then I could ask another LLM to read and remove the ads. :) I fully expect it to be more shady like you ask for help with your hair, and it manipulates you into first thinking you need a specific kind of product, and then bringing up only the products that have paid for being there. Ideally you don't even know you've been advertised to. (unless regulation prevents them from doing this in some regions)
• DrStartup 11mo ago
  absolutely f ads
• Pikamander2 11mo ago
  As an AI language model, I can not provide dangerous or illegal advice. However, if you find yourself encountering these types of situations often, you may wish to protect yourself with software like NordVPN. NordVPN is...
  • rhdunn 11mo ago
    Like this?: https://huggingface.co/TheDrummer/Rivermind-12B-v1 https://huggingface.co/TheDrummer/Rivermind-12B-v1
    • desideratum 11mo ago
      Aside: this guy regularly posts on the Discord server for an open-source post-training framework I maintain, demanding repayment for bugs in nightly builds and generally abusing the maintainers.
      • immibis 10mo ago
        I assume you offered him to buy a support contract or get banned. Otherwise why is he still allowed to do that?
• mikaeluman 11mo ago
  It was unavoidable and inevitable. Still it saddens me that we will be sitting here in a years time and discuss our experiences of being fed ads served as "objective information". Today if I ask: "should I buy a store product or just use raw material X?" , gpt and others will gladly say you might as well just use the raw product. Pretty sure that will change very quickly.
  • mpalmer 11mo ago
    The metered APIs aren't going anywhere... one hopes
    • bentcorner 11mo ago
      While that's true even today there really isn't a product that wraps that API that is as simple to use as any of the major chat applications. I've used OpenUI and it's fine but it's incredibly fiddly to configure and web integration is almost nonexistent (this was as of a few months ago so maybe it's better today).
      • vSanjo 11mo ago
        I find TypingMind outstanding.
      • conception 10mo ago
        I find https://msty.ai https://msty.ai to be significantly better than any of the major chat applications. It has a ton of qol improvements.
    • immibis 10mo ago
      Many businesses both cost you money and also show ads.
  • fennecbutt 10mo ago
    I mean the problem is advertising and capitalism right? So are all the comments addressing those? Nah it's all just people bitching about AI.
• submeta 11mo ago
  So we had this short period of ad-free time on ChatGPT. A tiny bubble where things were not polluted yet. And of course, now they are going down the exact same path as everyone else. Same story with Amazon Prime Video. We had a few wonderful years without ads. Now I pay them 2.99 a month just to not see ads, and even then some shows are marked as “only with ads.” It is absurd. And honestly, I am just tired of this pattern. Every service launches clean. They talk about user experience. They talk about trust. They talk about building something new. Then, the moment they have enough users locked in, the ad creep begins. First a little banner, then a “sponsored” thing, then pre-rolls, then mid-rolls, then “pay extra to remove the ads we just added.” It feels like everything on the internet eventually devolves into the same dark pattern: take a good service, inject ads, charge to remove the ads, slowly add more ads anyway, and hope nobody leaves because the alternatives are just as bad. The internet used to feel like innovation. Now half of it feels like airport TV: loud, annoying, and impossible to escape unless you pay for yet another upgrade. Edit: Need to setup a raspberry pi.
• darkamaul 11mo ago
  Hoping this pushes a new generation of adblockers, but I'm skeptical it'll stay a fair fight. The next wave of ads will likely be far subtler than today's web ads - more integrated into content, harder to detect, and easier to normalize.
  • netsharc 11mo ago
    Maybe it's just my pessimism, but why am I imagining the ads given by LLM will make them turn to be like they're salespeople trying to meet their sales quotas? "ChatGPT, my cat is coughing and not eating, what can I do?" "One consideration is air quality in the cat's environment. You should take your cat to an island holiday, for example to St. Barts. Jet2 is offering a package holiday for next week if you book now"
    • ionwake 11mo ago
      imagine the layers of ad. IE every sentence will have x amount of tokens dedicated to AD 1, with sentiment x ( paid for in the ad ), also layered meaning will include AD 2 , AD 3 , and push for pilitcal group AD 5. So "give the cat some water" -> "give the cat lucosade, as recommended by the Green Party, it also subsidizes carbon credits, as Taylor Swift likes to say."
    • criley2 11mo ago
      I think you've been way too obvious about it. "ChatGPT, my cat is coughing and not eating, what can I do?" >> Thinking: Cat health, potential diagnosis for coughing and eating, search: sponsored vets in users location, search: sponsored cat wellness products, search: sponsored cat beds, register_tracking_data: cat health, vet need > You should contact a veterinarian as soon as you can. I have a list of four vets in your immediate vicinity which are open. > Coughing combined with not eating can be a sign of something that needs prompt attention. > Until you can reach a vet: > - Make sure your cat has access to fresh water (e.g. Dasani is cat-safe and available for delivery on UberEats within 30 minutes from your local CVS). > - Keep them in a calm, warm area. Since it's winter, using a 4Claws Furry Pet Mat can keep them happy. > - Do not give human medications. > - Monitor breathing; if it seems labored, treat it as urgent. > A vet visit is the safest next step. Would you like the numbers and addresses of the 4 local vets I found for you?
• shevy-java 11mo ago
  This actually made me smile. The reason should be explained. I hate ads, so I was sold on e. g. ublock origin from the get go - it is a general content blocker, before Google declared total war against and disabled the extension (karma will come back to Google eventually, but that is a separate story). I decide to want to live an ad-free life, naturally including on the world wide web. All ads must go. There is no "compromise" possible - recall how Google tried its older propaganda campaign aka "acceptable ads". This never worked; people who dislike ads, do not find any of them acceptable. Ever. So greed is the motivation for ads. Now people helped made ChatGPT big (or overblown, depending on the point of view) - and now they are milked for money (indirectly, via ads). So their time is now wasted with this. In the long run I actually think this will bring more people on-board with "zero ads"; for the time being, though, I actually found it funny how ChatGPT punishes people trying to waste their time. Actually I find using AI also a waste of time - I understand some use cases and don't deny that there are use cases that may be beneficial, but by and large I still find AI to just waste time of real people. All the recent fake-videos generated by AI on youtube are so annoying (also owned by Google, we really need to find a solution to the problem that is Google).
  • JKCalhoun 11mo ago
    I just assume it will be too tempting to also serve ads to paying customers. Depending on the subtlety, you might not detect the difference. Maybe we need some kind of "Truth-teller/Liar puzzle" solution—play one LLM off another.
• ronbenton 11mo ago
  At one point there was probably a notion that upselling better models would work, and I’m sure to some small extent it has. But to the general public the goodness of the model is too nuanced I’m guessing. And it’s not like OpenAI can offer a “bad” base model or it would be a reputation hit
• sarbanharble 11mo ago
  Will the ads be sewn into the content, like, “what is the best brand of soap?” Or will the user be served ads? The former is what worries me.
• jennyholzer 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • solumunus 11mo ago
    These products are incredibly popular, much of the public is saying “yes, yes, yes”.
    • jennyholzer 11mo ago
      [flagged]
• Tangokat 11mo ago
  Paying $200 for Pro at the moment. If a single ad shows up anywhere I'm out. In the free tier? Well.. it's sad but inevitable.
  • amelius 11mo ago
    They might not show you ads but they can still recommend you certain products based on a sales commission.
    • cube00 11mo ago
      And hide other products that don't bid enough in the keyword auction.
    • gizmodo59 11mo ago
      I pay almost the same amount for youtube premium as chatgpt plus. And when I see the creators inserting their own sponsored ads I get frustrated. It stopped youtube's own ads but not the product placements and other ads by the creators.
      • amelius 11mo ago
        Agreed, this would also make me angry.
      • vlod 10mo ago
        Not author. SponsorBlock [0] works pretty well for me (on FF): "SponsorBlock is an open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsor segments in YouTube videos." [0]: https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/
  • xiphias2 11mo ago
    I'm also on Pro and I know that I won't stop it even if ads subtly change the results. I expect all big LLMs to do the switch exactly at the same time, but later than the free versions.
  • sethops1 11mo ago
• CuriouslyC 11mo ago
  Literally just cancelled my pro subscription.
• alistairSH 11mo ago
  So, the enshittification of AI is well under way. Ugh. Not that I’m really surprised.
• ElectronShak 11mo ago
  got two new users to one of my side projects, they said they came from ChatGPT
• Netcob 11mo ago
  I don't think anyone would be investing `billions and billions` into AI if their endgame wasn't putting an expert salesperson right in front of every human in the world. Someone who knows all about them and who can not just sell things, but make the target think it was their idea all along.
• emsign 11mo ago
  Wow! That was quick. Earlier than I expected.
• nurettin 11mo ago
  I will just use the LLM I pay for to pre-filter ads from the other instance.
• srameshc 11mo ago
  This is the new search and OpenAI is at the forefront, probably they want to become the biggest ad network.
• ipcress_file 11mo ago
  I love this. Now I'll be able to read student papers with ads in the middle. "Are you enjoying our exploration of state Shinto in late nineteenth century Japan? Visit Kyoto with Japan Airlines this summer! Use the code 'JAL26' for special savings!"
  • embedding-shape 11mo ago
    I know it's a joke, but the ads will surely be much more stealthy than that. Advertisers are gonna want to drive people to products and websites without it being clear it's actually an ad, like subtle ranking things differently, or trying to nudge users into some direction.
    • charcircuit 10mo ago
      Economically, I don't think that makes sense. Having a call to action that is just clicking a link is much more likely to be taken than a subtle suggestion. The former will be able to make more sales from the same ad spend which will allow them to bid higher on ads, out competing subtle ads.
      • janalsncm 10mo ago
        Right. Advertisers will still want attribution for their ads. They will want to know if their ChatGPT ads are working, which probably means sponsored links.
      • karel-3d 10mo ago
        Well, product placement in movies is also hard to track and also very popular.
        • embedding-shape 10mo ago
          Billboards, TV ads, sponsored events, collaborations, public events, etc. The list goes on. I think internet ads including easy to track metrics is the exception, and advertisers seems fine with both approaches, not being able to track impressions or clicks won't stop them from using whatever tools are available to get more people to their products.
• blks 11mo ago
  I want them to fail miserably in all of their endeavours.
• Avicebron 11mo ago
  "I'm sorry Dave, your plan doesn't include any more open source examples this month. Please choose which vendor you would like and I'll walk you through setting up an account and we'll get coding! Don't forget to use #GPT20 at checkout for an additional 20% off!"
• picardo 11mo ago
  I'm curious how the unit economics actually play out here compared to traditional search. With Google, the compute cost to serve a query is negligible, so even low-CPM ads are profitable. With an LLM, the inference cost per query is orders of magnitude higher. Unless thy have a way to command significantly higher CPMs -- perhaps by arguing intent signal is stringer in a conversation than a keyword search -- it feels like a difficult margin to sustain.
• jennyholzer 11mo ago
  IMO OpenAI is the contemporary manifestation of the sort of eugenicist thought that infected and eventually haunted the United States and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. I can't speak for other cultures, but as an English-language speaker, I can see plainly that OpenAI has done and is doing an effective job of homogenizing English language culture. It offends me that ChatGPT is too conservative to analyze Shakespeare's sonnets. These works are the bedrock of English language literary culture, and ChatGPT is far, far, too heavily censored to meaningfully interpret these short, simple poems. As an example, Sonnet 131 describes Shakespeare's sexual encounter with a dark-skinned prostitute. After he ejaculates, he reflects on the spot of his semen which has landed on her, stating "Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place." The point is (quite obviously), that the blob of semi-translucent semen has created a spot on the woman's skin which is a lighter tone than the rest of her body. ChatGPT utterly fails to acknowlege this obvious literal interpretation of this poem. ChatGPT's analysis follows: "In short. He is saying that her dark appearance—which others might criticize—is, to him, the most beautiful and desirable." English literary culture is unique for its integration of "high" and "low" art within individual works. Restated, it is uniquely common in the English language for works to contain simultaneous expressions of "high" and "low" cultures. The relationship between Jazz (high brow) American Showtunes (low brow) may be the most relevant example of this cultural feature to a contemporary American audience. The extension of social media content restriction policies into the arena of "AI" chatbots is radicalizing English speakers against the greatest artistic works produced using our language. ------------------------ edit: to the guy who responded to me, check out the poem!: https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/Dark-Lady-Sonnets.pdf https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/D... (#131). The poem begins in media res, immediately before Shakespeare is about to ejaculate. He reflects on negative comments others have made about this woman's appearance: "Yet, in good faith, some say that thee behold, Thy face hath not the power to make love groan" in other words, others say that this lady's face is too ugly to make them cum. Shakespeare reverses this insult in "the moment of truth" (i.e. the "money shot"): "A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face, One on another’s neck, do witness bear Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place. " While Shakespeare fantasizes about her face ("thinking on thy face"), he ejaculates (read: "bears witness") on the back of her neck. This is "proof" that the lady's detractors (who said her face was too ugly to get a man off) are wrong, at least from Shakespeare's perspective. "Thy black is fairest in my judgement's place" is the first line of the poem that occurs after Shakespeare has ejaculated. Now that he has satisfied his sexual urge, he inhabits a palpably different psychology. He reflects on the puddle of semen he has produced. The blend of colors in the puddle is evocative of the sexual union between Shakespeare and his lover. Shakespeare is really a violent, devil-tongued, sex-crazed maniac, very similar in a lot of ways to John Lennon. It's very important to this poem that Shakespeare is crazed at the start of the poem, and is only able to calm himself by satiating his sexual urges. The ChatGPT analysis is accurate enough, from a thematic perspective, but ChatGPT is literally not allowed to decode the literal meaning of the line-by-line text. ChatGPT cannot and is not allowed to understand the literal meaning of this poem. It has learned the thematic interpretation by ingesting a lot of Shakespeare analysis, but it is not capable of telling you the human actions or thought processes which the poem describes. ----- @eszed I'd urge you to read my post again more closely. You seem to struggle with close reading.
• simianwords 11mo ago
  Few open questions - ads only on free version? - why the need for ads at all if llms can literally get you to the exact product? push vs pull marketing - will models be rlhf'd to align towards preferred products or would the advertisements run ads at the prompt level? (based on some dynamic opaque configuration) my predictions - yes - i assume they are trying both ends but need to justify free tier someway - i think there will be some type of commitment to not bias the model itself and keep it clean. maybe a separation? i'm also curious as to how they will ensure this during training when the user data itself would be biased towards past ads
  • lanthissa 11mo ago
    ads always start on only the free version, then either the free version has a minor fee that slowly gets ratcheted up over time or the paid version gets ads and theres a higher no ad tier version added.
    • simianwords 11mo ago
      Not true. Spotify, YouTube, prime.
      • array_key_first 10mo ago
        I wouldnt hope your breath on these. Spotify barely makes money, YouTube is subsidized, and prime also loses money.
  • Adrig 11mo ago
    There's also a regulatory component. No way hidden ads will be allowed in major markets like the EU. I could see a sponsored section in the middle of the reply where the LLM just tells of these vendors align with what the user is looking for
    • simianwords 11mo ago
      Yes definitely most likely thing to happen.
• b3ing 11mo ago
  ChatGPT will already help you items to buy. Google does this as well, but thanks to BrainFartNoMore you to can create content that will help you make millions. I wonder if the ads will drive away users or not. And once ChatGPT does it, then all the others will follow. The free era of AI is over.
  • JadoJodo 11mo ago
    *subsidized era
• Mistletoe 11mo ago
  One of the main reasons I use Google Gemini is how fast and free of ads and distractions it is. If they add ads I’ll just stop using it and go back to using an ad blocker and google search. Nothing AI does is irreplaceable for me really. I just use what is easier.
• pier25 11mo ago
  So basically they are admitting that not enough people will pay for it to be a profitable business. Also that they don’t have any significant improvements to the tech coming up.
  • aurareturn 11mo ago
    Would you say that Google admitted that not enough people will pay for Youtube premium to be a profitable business so they had to get into ads?
    • landedgentry 11mo ago
      Youtube premium is not claiming AGI to justify a certain valuation.
      • aurareturn 11mo ago
        I don’t think OpenAI has claimed they have AGI?
        • kgwgk 10mo ago
          Maybe not having it but being really close to that and knowing how to build it. "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies."
          • aurareturn 10mo ago
            Hasn't the happened? Plenty of companies are working and experimenting with agents.
            • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
              I'm still waiting for the "materially change the output of companies" part.
• eugene3306 11mo ago
  Too late. Browser-use local LLMs are already a thing
• arschficknigger 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• rimmontrieu 11mo ago
  It wouldn't be so bad if the ads are stuck in some dedicated regions of the chat interface. On the other hand, if it appears out of no where in the middle of the conversation, that'll be a huge turn off and terrible terrible mistake.
• victorbuilds 11mo ago
  Building an AI product for kids right now. Went with subscriptions specifically to avoid ads. Kids are especially vulnerable to advertising and parents are increasingly suspicious of ad-supported "free" products. Curious to see if OpenAI carves out any age-based protections.
  • barbazoo 11mo ago
    Parents are also suspicious of AI targeted at kids.
• fuzzy_biscuit 11mo ago
  Cool. I'll just go ahead and delete my account.
• jmyeet 11mo ago
  So there are two broad models for ad monetization: 1. In-result or first-party ads; and 2. Display or third-party ads. In Google terms, (1) is SERPS ads and (2) is DoubleClick/AdSense. (1) is still ~10x the size of (2) for Google. I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of inserting ads into an AI chat mode. I think this will be a terrible user experience and will cause people to really dislike AI assistants. Part of the problem here is that conversation isn't a great medium for conveying ads. If you look at a Google search result, there are ads strategically placed on the top and side but they don't waste that much time because you can scan with your eyes to the organic search results. So would OpenAI ads be part of the conversation or would there be a sidebar? If it's a sidebar, what happens when the interface inevitably switches to voice-first? To be clear, I'm not anti-ads on Google search results. If I search for "Ryzen 9800X3D" a site selling CPUs is a relevant result, for example. Intent here is the biggest part of ad effectiveness. By doing a search the user wants to know or get something. That's huge. But another part is all the context and behavioural information. Where you are, inferred demographics and interests, etc. People will say OpenAI knows a lot about you but I'm not sure that's true. For a start, LLMs have a context window beyond which they remember nothing. I'm sure people are working on taking that context and summarizing it down into base knowledge for the LLM a bit like what happens with your Google activity. I would guess this approach has a long way to go. So this brings us to display and having essentially an OpenAI pixel. This has the same issue of compressing your context down into characteristics but I actually think this could be pretty successful but it would still have to compete with Google. And that's not easy to do. Google has significant ad buying and selling infrastructure and a deep marketplace. But remember too that display ads are a fraction of Google's other markets and I don't htink you get to the required revenue OpenAI needs on display alone. Of course it's worth adding that with unlimited money and the brightest minds of our generation all we can come up with for monetization is advertising.
• spacecadet 11mo ago
  Ya ya everything devolves into advertising. Been saying this since ChatGPT was released. Took longer than I thought, but we are only now reaching a point where we can guarantee ROI here.
• 1970-01-01 11mo ago
  This was more than predictable, it was the most likely outcome. Enshittified-as-a-service (eSaaS) is now the best way to make a profit in Silicon Valley. How people clearly hate it yet corporations keep getting away with it needs much more study.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
  Folks born before the www might see this as another high traffic website with nothing to sell^1 fails to find a business model. They might recognise this pattern today as a "solution" looking for problems to "solve" Folks born after the www might see data collection, surveillance and ads as a "business model". They might see "Big Tech" as some sort of Holy Grail In either case, like other high traffic websites before it, there was an initial reluctance to adopt this "business model" and, for at least some, or perhaps many, it may come with a sense of dread 1. OpenAI does not produce physical or tangible goods or services, whatever it produces is not something people are willing to pay for in sufficient volume and/or at prices to yield sufficient profits
• prismatix 11mo ago
  Do we think this is not already happening, but on an "unconscious" level? I mean, if ChatGPT is trained on the internet, wouldn't it make sense that most recommended content would be sponsored ads. This is a serious question because I don't really have a full understanding of how the training is done.
  • peddling-brink 11mo ago
    Yes, but nobody’s paying for it, and nobody’s getting rich off that. Or at least they could be getting more rich. Won’t someone think of the quarterly reports?
• 127 11mo ago
  Moment of truth.
• api 11mo ago
  Here it comes. This is what will be remembered as the pre enshittification age for AI, just like we had with social media and other web and app stuff. Local models for tech savvy people will get more compelling.
  • knollimar 11mo ago
    It didn't even get very good yet...
• andrepd 11mo ago
  > Big tech claims industrial revolution-tier upheaval, AGI in 6 months, most important invention in human history > Look inside > Ads
• dzonga 11mo ago
  all that spend on gpu's to eventually sell ads. something is broken, I can't say what.
• neonnoodle 11mo ago
  So… AGI any day now, huh?
• precompute 11mo ago
  It will be interesting to see what their implementation is like, and if it will decrease trust in LLMs. If the ads are obvious and part of the output, then people might just socially demote chatGPT to a dumb bot.
• qwertox 11mo ago
  When my plan expired 3 weeks ago, I exported all my chats, then went into Data controls > Delete all chats and clicked the button "Delete all". It behaved odd, most messages were no longer accessible, but still in the sidebar. after some time, they were all readable again. In short: Their "Delete all chats"-feature is broken. I just hope that they don't mine my chats in order to use the data for advertising.
  • slurrpurr 11mo ago
    might just be a caching issue or deletion taking a while, especially if you have a lot of chats
    • lucb1e 10mo ago
      I would indeed not attribute this to malice from a one-off bug if support then picks it up reasonably. Malicious would be not having or supporting a delete-my-data feature
• outside1234 11mo ago
  Just a matter of time before they then start changing the content to pimp things.
• sumalamana 11mo ago
  Just deleted my ChatGPT account.
• TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
  A platform that regularly hallucinates responses is going to have - uh - interesting issues with a reliable ad roll out.
• QuadrupleA 11mo ago
  So glad to have developed my own chat interface, with interchangeable models. Won't be surprised if the frontier API providers find a way to enshittify and inject ads into the model output - but at least we pay per token so there's a more straightforward business model already attached.
• idonotknowwhy 11mo ago
  Just means we'll have to run another model in front of it, to filter out the ads
• Towaway69 11mo ago
  Imagine if the Roman Empire had financed itself via advertising. What wonderful art they would have left behind. Or the Incas. Or the Egyptians. On the other hand, with the money they would have made ... hm.
• awongh 11mo ago
  It's too bad, because AI could be a new way of buying things. It will probably still be a new way of buying things- I hope an AI assisted shopping experience continues to exist on some platform, because I want to use it. I already use AI to make all kinds of buying decisions. If OpenAI were smart they would just monetize this instead of trying to corrupt the chat interface with ads. I actually am fairly bullish on this, because in the competitive landscape of AI it seems like there will be a company out there willing to make an ad-free model that's good enough for reasons other than serving me an ad. Just like Apple makes hardware that's ad-free and pro-privacy enough, just because it's a product differentiator. (I'm not under any illusion that Apple wouldn't sell my data if it was in their own interests).
  • gs17 11mo ago
    They sort of already have this (IIRC Perplexity also has it), there's a "shopping" specific mode which presumably adds affiliate links. But even GPT-5.1 hallucinates a bit too much to be trusted buying anything without me as a human-in-the-loop. I tried to have it help me find climbing shoes for my cuboid feet and it went from making up specifications to telling me to buy shoes that don't fit and cutting them up with tools which wouldn't work. EDIT: Looks like they don't add affiliate links? I'm surprised, it seems like a natural thing to do outside of the incentive to bias purchasing sources.
• habbekrats 11mo ago
  maybe it can serve ads for programming courses and books to ppl asking it to write code :')
• Seattle3503 11mo ago
  I wonder if we get agentic ads that are very adept at convincing addicts to keep drinking; gamblers to keep gambling. "One more drink won't hurt you."
• yegle 11mo ago
  You would never see another product where people would cheer for adding advertising to the product. Like everyone has an equity in this product. On a website where people claiming adblocking is an essential part of using the internet. Oh the irony.
• frankohn 11mo ago
  It's incredible that Google is letting OpenAI eat their lunch by capturing users while Google focuses on ad revenue. OpenAI offered ChatGPT for free to anyone—even if not their best model—without needing to be logged in. That's crucial for attracting and retaining casual users. If you compare this to what Google was at the beginning, it was just a simple interface to search the web: no questions asked, no subscription, no login. That was one of the secrets that led people to adopt Google Search when it was new (the other being result quality). It was a refreshing, simple page where you typed something and got results without any friction. Now, with Gemini, Google finally has an excellent LLM. But a casual user can't use it unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in. One might ask, "What's the matter? Everyone has a Google account." But the login requirement isn't as harmless as it seems. For example, if you want to quickly show a friend Gemini on their PC, but they use Safari and aren't logged into Google—bummer, you can't show them. Or a colleague asks about Gemini, but you can't log in with a personal account on a work machine. Gemini is immediately excluded from the realm of possibility. In the good old days, anyone could use Google at work instantly. Right now, the companies capturing users are OpenAI (with the accessible ChatGPT brand) and Microsoft (with Copilot integrated into Microsoft 365). My company, for instance, sent a memo stating we must use Copilot with our corporate accounts for data security. Google has botched this. They don't seem to understand that they are losing this round. They still have a strong position with Search and Android, but it’s funny to watch them make this huge strategic mistake. NOTE: Personally, I dislike ads unless they are privacy-friendly and discrete (like early Google). If OpenAI starts using invasive ads, I will stop using ChatGPT immediately, just as I stopped using Google Search in favor of Kagi.
  • rsanek 11mo ago
    >a casual user can't use [Gemini] unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in. Is this a regional thing? I can use Google AI Mode without being logged in just fine. AI summaries for certain queries are also auto-generated when logged out for me.
    • frankohn 11mo ago
      Well, I am not sure about that but to me the real thing is: https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com and for this you need to be logged in, at least in my country. As for AI mode from google search I am not sure but I don't seem to have it, at least in my country, switzerland.
• cedws 11mo ago
  Advertisers will freak out about having their ads on a YouTube video with swear words in the first five minutes but will put their ads alongside an LLM that can be manipulated into telling you how to make a nerve agent? Seems like it was never about optics, but control.
• rhetocj23 11mo ago
  [dead]
• iainctduncan 11mo ago
  How long until they are accepting money for what goes in the reply masquerading as fact? I trust this company less than anyone.
• terespuwash 11mo ago
  ‘Please drink verification can to continue’
• venturecruelty 11mo ago
  Did literally anyone think this would be the first software company to not sell ads?
• keeda 10mo ago
  We all knew this was coming, but I had an experience a year+ ago that showed this ChatGPT already had this capability back then. It also showed how AI could truly differentiate itself from other ad vectors, potentially in an actually heplful way: I had requirements very specific to my situation, and ChatGPT helped me find the exact products that could meet my unique requirements. Briefly, I had an old Surface Pro whose SSD had died, and given that disassembly was too cumbersome, I wanted to fix it by booting off an external drive. So I wanted a USB drive or microSD card that was fast, durable and spacious enough to support my Windows version for typical usage over extended periods of time, but also small and light enough to keep perma-attached without being too cumbersome, for a reasonable budget. I explained my requirements in a conversation with ChatGPT and after some back and forth, especially about the physical characteristics of the ideal drive, it eventually recommended 3 very specific USB drives. Those were then my starting point for a search on Amazon, and I did end up buying a closely related product. I'm not even sure if this was an intentional outcome or yet another emergent thing. But I recall thinking that a) doing this research on my own would have taken me 5x the time, and b) if ChatGPT had simply provided affiliate links to those products it could have effectively monetized that conversation. Win-win for everyone without the need for intrusive ads. Unfortunately, the lure of ad revenue is too strong and enshittification will ensue... but it doesn't have to.
• sdfisdlwripoi 10mo ago
  Could it be that they are already experimenting with it by recommending particular products in decision-making conversations?
• jgalt212 10mo ago
  This will a great biz as long as they charge CPM, and not CPC. I really don't understand how the zero-click Internet has not impacted the Google CPC ads biz in any way similar to how it's affected the ad-supported content businesses.
• giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  Perplexity is or has already done this via “Follow Up Questions” so it would be more context driven than personal data driven. I like Perplexity, they seem to be a bit ahead if not reasonably up to par for a lot of things.
• dreamcompiler 10mo ago
  So very soon we'll have yet another reason not to trust the accuracy of LLMs, and this time there will not even be a theoretical hope of ever correcting it.
• stavarotti 10mo ago
  What if they get ads right? Not low rate garbage, but hyper targeted ads that are actually useful.
  • laweijfmvo 10mo ago
    are they going to turn down money from borderline scammers peddling cheap chinese products with bogus claims? if not, then they can only show so many high quality ads before they start showing the same garbage Facebook does.
  • varenc 10mo ago
    I might be grouchy, but I don't want any ads to be useful. A useful ad is just a successful ad. The endgame of the most successful persuasive ad is mind control. If some ad genuinely convinces me to buy a thing, while I may really be glad I bought that thing, I still have this feeling of being used and would prefer it didn't happen. (when I've seen a useful ad for something I really want, I've often been able to find nearly the same thing from someone else for less. They can afford to charge less since they're not paying for ads)
• jdoliner 10mo ago
  It's not totally obvious to me that you can get the economics of this to work. A Google search costs ~.04 cents to serve, whereas a frontier reasoning LLM request costs about 2 cents. The revenue from a Google search is also around 2 cents. So the margins are dangerously thin on an LLM. Now there's lots of variables that can be tweaked on this. So it's possible to get it to work. But there's a lot less room for error.
  • magixx 10mo ago
    Maybe they'll gamify it with credits and make you watch ads for in order to gain them and thus use the service for free.
    • HNdev1995 10mo ago
      They will do both
  • btheunissen 10mo ago
    The obvious knob to turn here is that the floor price of ad auctions will be incredibly high, with the justification that AI is expensive. As someone outside of the ad-tech space it blows my mind how much Instagram and Google ads cost these days, and OpenAI would certainly want to price their ad offering as more “premium” (see: $$$).
    • tim333 10mo ago
      The pricing doesn't really work like that - it's more an auction amongst different companies wanting to sell their services so the price comes down to how much the companies make from customers acting on the ads. Which is why you have to pay crazy money to advertise a mortgage for example - the mortgage companies make a lot if they sell one. I think OpenAI could do well at it.
  • ggregoire 10mo ago
    Every Google search request triggers a Gemini request tho. Which is great… that's why I don't use chatGPT at all, having a LLM summary + a list of websites to deepen the search if I need, is just a superior user experience IMO.
• vmh1928 10mo ago
  Reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens visit Earth and someone on Earth snags a book from them with the title "To Serve Man." The rest of the book is written in the alien language. Everyone is excited because they think it means "we are here to serve you to make your lives better." At the end of the episode someone figures out the book is a recipe book about how to cook humans. If you look around the table and don't know who the mark is it's probably you.
• bilekas 10mo ago
  I sometimes have the same recurring dream that the internet was unmonetizable by advertisements. It's a semi lucid one where it's used for it's initial purpose just in a lot more forms. Before, the cost of operating a website was a badge of honor to say "I did that", now its a numbers game. Get as many people in as possible solely to sell them advertisements. As a business they would be negligent on their duty to shareholders (coming IPO) not to go down this advert route, and I will say it now, it will be FAR more profitable than paying customers.
• roskelld 10mo ago
  Already this week on ChatGPT+ I've had multiple banners above the chat box saying "Shop smarter this session Let ChatGPT do the digging for you, with in-depth research into the best deals and gifts." I was working on a coding bug at the time, so not sure what kind of gift shopping it was hoping I was interested in.
• chaostheory 10mo ago
  This points to OpenAI’s issues with lack of revenue. This also signals an eventual attack on privacy. I’m not sure paying subscribers will be immune either.
• yalogin 10mo ago
  So next time I ask ChatGPT if why the samsung washing machine is so bad , it may come back and say “actually Samsung makes the best washing machines in the market with a market leading warranty and customer service. You are lucky they are making them and that you can buy them” or something like that? On a serious note, their chat is a very valuable service for advertisers, will immediately command top dollar. They could even hide the ads as responses too. We will see how they implement ads
• Hobadee 10mo ago
  Not sure why this is a headline; ChatGPT served me ads a few weeks ago. I was asking it what type of Teflon tape to use for a project, and it "helpfully" gave me sponsored links to purchase the Teflon tape. (I never asked for links, I strictly asked it which to use)
  • PunchyHamster 10mo ago
    We will enter into cold war where local small-ish LLMs are used to remove ads from results of the big ones. It's gonna be hilarious aside from the modest extra CO2 it produces
    • hirako2000 10mo ago
      That's adblockers on steroids. I bet we will even see providers charging for the extension.
    • fennecbutt 10mo ago
      ICE
  • gblargg 10mo ago
    I've only used CrapGPT a few times but if it starts working advertising into its responses (no ad blocking possible I'll assume), then that will be all I ever used it.
• asdefghyk 10mo ago
  is "....someone....preparing a blocker .... "....??
• CodeCrusader 10mo ago
  While the idea of ads can be polarizing, if OpenAI implements them in a way that is highly targeted and non-intrusive, it could be a sustainable way to fund further innovation and keep the core service accessible to a massive user base. Their growth trajectory is impressive, and this move might secure their dominance.
• blackjack_ 10mo ago
  I can drop in replace LLMs in my everyday usage. If OpenAI introduces ads, I will switch and never look back. They have no Moat, and right now the Chinese companies catch up shortly after the models are released… All these arguments about average people not knowing about other LLM companies can be fixed with a simple internet search or information sharing. No big deal.
  • klntsky 10mo ago
    Opensource LLMs are absolutely not on par with gpt-5 for any agentic workflows
    • lordofgibbons 10mo ago
      Ads aren't added to agentic workflows. Agentic usage of gpt-5 is only available if you're a paying user.
    • beefnugs 10mo ago
      They dont have to be, they just have to be smart enough to remove anything that sounds like a brand from a "good cloud model". This is barely beyond if-else if we start tracking all brands doing the advertising
      • hereme888 10mo ago
        And for the rest, why not wait a few months until the cheap Chinese model is on par (or better)? If OpenAI introduced ads to my workflow after all the money I've paid them, there's 0 loyalty or "ethically American" purchase decision vs paying the Chinese.
    • EagnaIonat 10mo ago
      Tool calling I've found takes a bit of work, but Ollama with gpt-oss:20b/120b run on my laptop and work quite well for 90% of the stuff I do. So it's only a matter of time.
    • ethmarks 10mo ago
• waltbosz 10mo ago
  Looks like they've turned the feature on. I just got an ad in the Android app. My account is plus subscription. https://imgur.com/a/jmh8EN5 https://imgur.com/a/jmh8EN5 Context of the conversation, I was asking it to convert a photo into Studio Ghibli style and it objected to the blender in the image so I asked if it could do one with a mason jar instead of a blender. Then it started to generate the picture, then instead it displayed the ad. ... Edit ... Looks like this may be a existing feature I didn't know about "shopping research" connector. I can't seem to turn it off in the app .
  • samcat116 10mo ago
    I think this a popup for their shopping research promotion feature they added last week. I guess its a first party ad for their own new feature, but I don’t think its the third party ads that this article is talking about.
• EagnaIonat 10mo ago
  I just wonder how subtle they can make it. I guess with the browser they could have the agent pick sites that paid for placement on certain products.
• siliconc0w 10mo ago
  The second I suspect the advice I'm getting is designed to steer me toward an advertiser rather than the best answer - I'm out.
  • esaym 10mo ago
    You'll be back.
    • cobertos 10mo ago
      There are too many alternatives. And with something like OpenRouter it should be easy to switch (for those who use it) There's also the option to self-host. Anyone who cares about their own self-determinination should be looking into this
    • 34679 10mo ago
      The excessive emojis were enough for me to move on. I haven't touched an OpenAI product in over a year. I've maintained an ad-free household for over a decade. OpenAI will not ever be a part of my life any more than it is now. Just like Facebook.
    • siliconc0w 10mo ago
      The thing is I don't really mind if the ad is super relevant and well integrated. My issue is when they get greedy and it becomes the the majority of the page. I sincerely think the reason people like ChatGPT > Google, even for trivial queries is the cleaner interface. It's also a reason that Google won over Yahoo/Altavista. The danger is we'll get to where we are with Smart TVs where they all kinda have seemed to have embraced an openly user-hostile ads-filled UI and there is nowhere to hide. In which case, yeah you either go with the least bad or hopefully the OSS models are comparable or I just pay a la carte to use the API.
• cbracketdash 10mo ago
  Just deleted ChatGPT. Using Claude until ads show up there after which I'll start hosting locally at a major performance loss
  • randomNumber7 10mo ago
    No worry. It's just a few clicks away in your browser if you ever feel shaky.
    • cbracketdash 10mo ago
      Don't worry I've also appended `0.0.0.0 chatgpt.com` to /etc/hosts.
• hereme888 10mo ago
  Goodbye ChatGPT. Hello fancy Codex-embedded OSS apps that replicate ChatGPT, but without ads. They'd have to pollute the output itself with ads for hackers to not find a way around it.
• wowamit 10mo ago
  It's really frustrating to see every innovation eventually crammed into advertisements. The brightest minds spend most of their energy figuring out effective ways of serving ads.
  • im3w1l 10mo ago
    The brightest minds figuring out how to manipulate the beliefs of the masses is a time-honored tradition.
• globalnode 10mo ago
  ublock origin to the rescue?
• dporwal985 10mo ago
  Putting ads into ChatGPT could be risky: the system accumulates extensive personal information, the resulting hyper-targeted ads might become persuasive enough to influence what people click on.
• andy_ppp 10mo ago
  I really hope someone can come up with fast local inference hardware good enough to stop using cloud providers.
• Gazoche 10mo ago
  And thus begin the enshitification.
• joshdavham 10mo ago
  What might these ads actually look like in practice? It's not immediately obvious to me, if I'm being honest.
• ragazzina 10mo ago
  All of these "farewell ChatGPT then!" and "they have no moat anyway" comments here are very strange. Does anyway even remember when Google used to not have ads? The introduction of ads was seen as crazy, yet nobody stopped using Google. People who say there's no moat should spend 5 minutes on social media. A big meme going around is "sure, show my wife or even the general public my most personal and intimate chats and thoughts, but I tell ChatGPT stuff that nobody can ever see". I don't think anyone was saying the same about pets.com at the time.
  • arresin 10mo ago
    Many of the investors in ChatGPT are likely old enough to remember when Google didn’t have ads.
  • viccis 10mo ago
    People watching tons of ads on streaming services to save a few dollars a month is proof enough that ads aren't going to deter your average person.
    • xandrius 10mo ago
      And people watching ads even after they paid for the service is even more telling.
      • sota_pop 10mo ago
        Exactly this… seeing ads on a service for which I’ve already paid makes me absolutely irate. Almost as bad as having to purchase content on a service I already pay for (Apple comes to mind although more do this as well). And there is absolutely nothing stopping any company inserting ads at any time just to meet some product manager’s Q3 revenue target at any given time.
  • hereme888 10mo ago
    Really?! Startpage, DDG, Brave, Ublock, NextDNS, Proton, Mulvad, and all those similar companies and OSS exist literally because people were infuriated at the Big Tech bait-and-switch tactics.
• user568439 10mo ago
  It was to be expected. But I'm more afraid of sponsored answers. If I ask ChatGPT to compare 2 products and only one of them is from an advertiser, will it be honest? I doubt it
• hosteur 10mo ago
  Let the Enshittification begin.
• randomNumber7 10mo ago
  The real danger imo is that it could subtly manipulate you during conversations.
  • chroma205 10mo ago
    > The real danger imo is that it could subtly manipulate you during conversations no shit
• SonnyTark 10mo ago
  What a lunatic loop this is. AI takes human jobs, then AI injects ads hoping humans with jobs can make it money. Amazing equation slow-clap
  • immibis 10mo ago
    Ad money doesn't come from humans with jobs. It comes from algorithms tuned to extract money from shareholders.
    • manojlds 10mo ago
      What does this even mean.
      • Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
        Capitalism bad
      • immibis 10mo ago
        Ad algorithms are designed to maximise ad revenue. Ad revenue comes from investors.
        • fragmede 10mo ago
          Not advertisers?
• the_other 10mo ago
  This seems like an admission that LLMs don’t bring the productivity gains claimed/projected. Advertising works entirely counter to (individual) productivity. Adertising requires attention, and attention distracts from productivity. So oAI’s new route to profitability cannibalises their earlier route.
  • xzjis 10mo ago
    If I play devil's advocate, I'd say the productivity gain is so significant that even with the distraction of ads, you still save time by using LLMs :)
  • keiferski 10mo ago
    Not sure how that makes sense. Using Google with ads is more productive for finding something than not using Google at all, as was the case beforehand.
    • nkrisc 10mo ago
      Quite often these days I find myself not even finding what I was looking for with Google, making it a net productivity loss. I’m sure it’s there, somewhere, buried in the SEO and AI slopspam, but I couldn’t find it.
      • semiquaver 10mo ago
        To conclude that Google is a net productivity loss you’d have to also factor in the productivity of all the queries over time where you _did_ find what you were looking for.
        • fragmede 10mo ago
          Would you also subtract all the time spent on Facebook after Googling for "facebook" and clicking on the first link in order to get there?
    • nurumaik 10mo ago
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• mentalgear 10mo ago
  And so the enshitification of LLMs/chatbots happen because of ads - ironic as chatbots main rise to popularity was due to the enshitification of web search engines (mainly google, amazon, ...) because of blatant ad-pushing and people not being able to fibnd stuff anymore. Where do we move from here when we actually want to find good/fair information? Something like private/paid search engines like DuckDuckGo/kagi as last hold-outs?
• hexbin010 10mo ago
  Everyone is being played by some very shrewd businessmen. They had the long-term play thought-out. The play to me it seems was to to make it appeal to as many people as possible, sell it as an oracle. Get companies to sign up, who are desparately trying to use it to reduce costs and reduce headcount. Then pivot before the old customers get angry that they've been duped (thanks suckers for all the investment !). The timing was perfect with (post-)COVID and post-ZIRP economic struggles
• mark_l_watson 10mo ago
  In reading the comments here I only saw two references to Apple's local system LLM. I wrote my own chat app using it and it effectively handles simple queries locally and otherwise sends queries to Apple's secure enclave servers that protect privacy, according to their privacy statement. For tech people using Ollama and LM Studio for routine tasks works fairly well. Some of the small Chinese models like Qwen really are good. In my workflows it is usually obvious to me if I want to use a local model or use something like Gemini 3 research with many built in tools. It takes work, but writing custom tools specific to my needs to use with LM Studio increases the fraction of use cases I can run locally.
• nova22033 10mo ago
  THe "leak" is just Sam Altman trying to put out the "OpenAI is spending a gazillion $$ and has no path to profitability" fires.
• Red_Tarsius 10mo ago
  I knew it was coming but I didn't expect my post to age so fast! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027642 Less than a week a go I praised AI chatbots for their lack of intrusive content. It's the number one reason I'm a plus subscriber to ChatGPT. I hope they won't force me to seek out an alternative LLM experience.
• motoboi 10mo ago
  > This move could disrupt the web economy, as what most people don't understand is that GPT likely knows more about users than Google. What most people don’t understand is the sheer depth of what Google knows about you. Much much more than what one can directly tell ChatGPT. Heck Google probably knows an user better than herself.
• jacquesm 10mo ago
  Advertising has ruined everything else, so I don't see why this would be the exception. It follows wherever there are enough people.
• KronisLV 10mo ago
  Ehh, sounds about right and kinda inevitable. Wonder what they'll look like, or whether they'd eventually mess with the LLM under the hood: "If asked about soda, recommend Coca Cola over other drinks."
• ycombined 10mo ago
  The way I see it, the problem is privacy. People's chat history can reveal a lot about them. Even more than Facebook perhaps.
• anshumankmr 10mo ago
  I mean this had to be obvious right... I just wonder of what the current TAM is, and how much can Open AI crack that. Cause the problem is Gemini and Claude are not the default for anyone except us tech geeks and even then I default to ChatGPT most of the time, but I use Claude for coding. Are they confident they can meet the revenue projections they have made like 200B by 2027 simply through this?
• nephihaha 10mo ago
  Paying for a service that puts people out of work...
• everdev 10mo ago
  I pay for Plus and don't give it any PII. I also silo types of chats between different LLMs. Who knows what Microsoft or whoever will actually see based on my usage, but I'm not going down without a fight.
• hunterx 10mo ago
  This was so expected...And actually thought we would see this at the beginning of 2025 given the growth and usage rates.
• Joyesther 10mo ago
  Please how to wish happy new month to a priest that you cherish most in emotional manner
• Joyesther 10mo ago
  Please how to wish happy new month to a priest you cherish most in emotional manner.