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>Mission alignment: Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more ac

• simianwords 9mo ago
  > Advertising and marketing kills humanity No it doesn't. Please stope the hyperbole. Its literally just advertisements and people have the agency to choose to buy products.
  • miltonlost 9mo ago
    "just" advertisements when ChatGPT is designed to be sycophantic and manipulative
    • simianwords 9mo ago
      No its not designed to be that way. I literally can't get ChatGPT to agree with me on 5.2 with many things. Its just not possible.. I'd request you to give me an example of it being sycophantic and encouraging delusional behaviour (as a shareable link).
      • OAIToTheMoon 9mo ago
        [flagged]
      • miltonlost 9mo ago
        https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/chatgpt-wrote-goodnight-moon-suicide-lullaby-for-man-who-later-killed-himself/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/chatgpt-wrote-go... Everyone who works at chatgpt has blood on their hands
    • mgraczyk 9mo ago
      Do you have any evidence that this claim is true? That it was "designed" for this? That would be a pretty difficult conspiracy for them to keep secret
      • OAIToTheMoon 9mo ago
        [flagged]
      • miltonlost 9mo ago
        They famously literally had to turn down the sycophancy. ChatGPT is designed to get you addicted to it: https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/ https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/
        • mgraczyk 9mo ago
          Do you think this is evidence that it was designed that way, as opposed to the exact opposite? It was not designed that way, so they had to specifically do extra things to make it not that way. This is like saying that python is designed to be slow and linking to a post about speeding up the python interpreter as evidence
  • alembic_fumes 9mo ago
    I invite you to ponder the question: would a worldwide ban of all advertising have a greater or smaller impact on environment-destroying activity than banning of all air travel? I would argue for "greater", and from that it rather naturally follows that advertisement and marketing indeed kills humanity.
    • simianwords 9mo ago
      Sure but its just people buying things.. so what?
      • OAIToTheMoon 9mo ago
        Why do your recent comments defend OpenAI so strongly?
        • simianwords 9mo ago
          I'm specifically defending advertisement here.
        • satvikpendem 9mo ago
          I dislike this framing. Criticizing an argument is not defending, and it certainly doesn't mean the critic likes the opposing side of the argument. Seems like you're the one with the bias, having created your account just today for this one specific post.
          • OAIToTheMoon 9mo ago
            OK. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640744, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641035, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644216, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645814
            • 9mo ago
  • Aerbil313 9mo ago
    Not really. Advertising results in extreme market inefficiencies through the game theory playing out (if you don't advertise as a company, you lose out to companies that do). It's the massive sink of the modern economy, there's nearly no sector unaffected by it. If advertising was banned (not that it's very easy) vast majority of issues associated with capitalism wouldn't even exist and everybody would be wealthier. The similarity between advertising and cancer are striking, see the post Advertising is a cancer on society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142 This is all putting aside the fact that %99.9 of all advertising works by exploiting the familiarity circuit in the human brain. The effects of advertising are, by definition, not voluntary. See Ads just work, no matter what you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399633 If the purpose of %99.9 of advertising was not exploiting the familiarity circuit and was instead to make you aware of a product you didn't know about before, there wouldn't be a single ad of Coca-Cola, since everybody on the planet knows about it already. Also, my mom literally buys whatever she sees playing on YouTube ads that week. I know because I see those ads too. You'd be surprised how many people are going through life with undiagnosed or untreated ADHD and how many further lack cognitive agency.
    • simianwords 9mo ago
      Almost all products we use today were marketed to us in one way or another using advertisements. Without ads, we would expect a very slow diffusion of information and wait tediously for word of mouth to spread and get access to good products. Thats not efficient.
      • Aerbil313 9mo ago
        Web search is and always was perfectly suited to find the product you need, as are the multitude of e-commerce websites active in any country. Searching does not require advertising or word of mouth. Word of mouth is not inefficient either in a world with internet, the person telling you about a product likely saw it and purchased it online already.
    • simianwords 9mo ago
  • m4ck_ 9mo ago
    To be clear, I'm not saying that advertising under whatever slop chatgpt outputs is killing humanity, I'm more thinking of the industry as a whole. They use lies and deception to influence behavior and push products; even if they're fully aware that the claims they're making are blatant lies and the products are harmful. If that industry disappeared humanity would be better off for it. and to be fair the industry doesn't need to be banned, just heavily regulated, fully transparent, and there should be exponential consequences for their lies (such as, claiming cigarettes are healthy while knowing they're addictive and cause cancer; anyone involved in decisions like that should be in Angola growing tobacco for 13 cents an hour.)
    • simianwords 9mo ago
      No I don't think humanity would be better off without ads. Google became what it is with ads.
      • layer8 9mo ago
        Google having become what it is doesn’t seem like a good argument.
        • simianwords 9mo ago
          Go to any third world country, peep into their phones and you will realise - they are using android - google maps - youtube Not to mention Waymo and LLM's literally came out of Google. Google will go down as one of the most important institutions in the last 100 years.
          • piva00 9mo ago
            If it weren't Google it would be someone else providing those services, Google Maps didn't invent GIS for the masses (I worked at a GIS company that was widely used in the country I lived way before Google Maps existed). To me the biggest impact of Google in the history of mankind was making Internet search actually good. Android wasn't invented there, YouTube wasn't invented there, they had the capital to scale those but I don't think it's their greatest achievement compared to Search in the early 2000s.
  • robotpepi 9mo ago
    People have the agency to not consume drugs. The point is, marketing is completely absurd, it's an immense inefficiency of the system.
    • adventured 9mo ago
      Modern marketing is largely extraordinarily efficient in fact, the opposite of absurd. It does a marvelous job of letting people know that things exist to be purchased. It's a compliment to free will. Buy, don't buy, the choice is yours. What someone thinks of marketing & advertising will almost always tell you what they think of the intelligence of the typical person. Once you realize that, you realize it's merely a bias that someone is arguing from, that they think most everybody else is a moron and should be deprived of their individual liberty (for their own safety).
      • robotpepi 9mo ago
        It makes the system very inefficient, don't twist my words, you're talking about something else. And this is not about intelligence, I'm not saying people make stupid choices. This is a question of perverse marketing incentives.
        • satvikpendem 9mo ago
          You haven't really said why it's inefficient, just saying it doesn't make it so. I can see the point of why it's efficient, that it shows people what is possible to buy in the market that they otherwise would not have known of, but I don't see it from your side.
          • robotpepi 9mo ago
            it's already been explained in other comments: companies spend a shit ton of money to trick you (via storytelling, branding, slogans, influencers, psychological manipulation, etc) into buying shit. moreover, this is structurally necessary because a company without marketing is outperformed by one with it.
  • imiric 9mo ago
    Spoken like a true advertiser. The reality is that psychologically manipulating people into buying things by forcing yourself as a middleman into every business transaction and industry on the planet is not just morally despicable, but opportunistic, exploitative, and many other negative descriptors I can't quite put into words. But this isn't even the truly insidious and harmful part. That is reserved for the fact that the same systems used to get people to consume, are also used to manipulate them into thinking and acting in ways that someone, somewhere, could potentially benefit from. So anyone with a negligible amount of resources and effort has the ability to influence individuals, groups of people, societies, and entire countries, to buy into their agenda by pushing their propaganda. After all, modern advertising uses the same propaganda tactics pioneered by the likes of E. Bernays a century ago. It should be clear to any sane adult that this psychological manipulation is directly responsible for the corruption of democratic processes and sociopolitical instability we've seen around the world for the past decade+. And then, if all this wasn't enough, these advertising leeches are doing this by violating digital rights, abusing our privacy, corrupting every entertainment experience, and utilizing every nasty trick they can legally get away with to steal our data, and get rich from it via dark data broker markets in perpetuity. So, please, spare me the bullshit excuse that this is "just" advertising, and that it's a public good that helps poor small businesses reach customers. Catalogs and contextual advertising have existed for decades, but that wasn't enough for these greedy bastards. Humanity is objectively far worse off because of this, and the adtech industry has played a huge role in making it happen. Everyone who has worked on this tech should be ashamed of themselves, even though I'm sure they don't think twice about it, and enjoy the sight of their bank account statements.
    • satvikpendem 9mo ago
      People say all this but have no alternative solution.
      • robotpepi 9mo ago
        that's fair, but the sentence "marketing kills the humanity" remains true.
      • 9mo ago
  • piva00 9mo ago
    There's agency but it's being manipulated by psychological tricks since the advent of the whole PR industry. That's how it was born, Edward Bernays discovered he could use techniques borrowed from his uncle Sigmund Freud to manipulate people to buy stuff. Given this trickery I wouldn't say that people have absolute complete agency, they are being exploited, even more the ones that are more affected by trick A or B. I do agree it should be more nuanced than "it's killing humanity" but at the same time I believe you should meet more in the middle that there are manipulative tactics used by the whole PR industry that are exploitative, and do affect people's agency.
• xyzzy123 9mo ago
  It does feel like ensh*ttification. I can't imagine how many school essays and law filings and papers these ads are going to end up embedded in. But the most charitable view is that even AGI needs cost recovery. Ads are the way you do this for people who aren't willing or able to pay with money. For better or worse, OpenAI exists in the context of a capitalist system. It has to be competitive in that arena to attract and retain investment, staff, etc. Revenue always ends up being part of the "mission".
  • boelboel 9mo ago
    The biggest problem with ads is that even if I were willing to pay any amount of money I would still get many of the problems brought by this 'ad run' world. There's enough things where you can't even avoid ads.
• henryfjordan 9mo ago
  Advertisement serves an important purpose. If you were a farmer with a mule and the tractor salesman came by for the first time, that would be life-changing for you. You wouldn't say that salesman was evil for advertising his tractor.
  • m4ck_ 9mo ago
    Fair enough, there is some utility to it. But we're quite along way from traveling salesmen advertising tractors. Maybe it doesn't need to be eliminated, just heavily regulated. What if the salesman said knowingly lied about his tractors? or poisoned the farmer's mules to influence him towards buying one? That'd be on the scale of evil, right?
    • henryfjordan 9mo ago
      The poster above me suggested advertising is inherently evil and should be abolished, I was just countering that absolutist position. I don't disagree that there are absolutely some awful ads out there, and that they should be regulated heavily. I've been getting so many ads for semaglutide on tiktok lately that seem designed to prey on people with eating disorders. Whoever is behind those is evil.
• GenerWork 9mo ago
  If they can’t advertise, then how should they make a profit/hit break even?
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• imiric 9mo ago
  > kinda getting mixed messages here Did you really expect a corporation to be transparent and consistent with their messaging? It should be obvious by now that the word "open" in their name is pure marketing. I'm surprised it took them this long to jump on the advertising money train. I wouldn't be surprised if they were already monetizing this in the background, and only decided to make it public now.