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OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions
- huflungdung 9mo ago[dead]
- simmerup 9mo agoIt’s disturbing just how much more insidious ads could be through a chat bot
- wnevets 9mo agoIt wasn't that long ago I got down voted on HN for saying this was going to happen.
- gpt5 9mo agoAs a general rule of thumb in sites like Reddit and HN - the quality of votes is significantly lower than the quality of comments. This is because it takes much more effort to comment, so there is a selection bias.
- musicale 9mo agoI'm not convinced that downvotes add much value. They should be a "this is irrelevant/spam" button but in practice they seem to be used as a "dislike" button to enforce groupthink.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- xtracto 9mo agoSlashdot moderation and something going by having people tag comments as Insightful, Interesting, Offtopic or flamebait. It assigned positive or negative points based on that. The two problems were the horrible UI and that at some points evaluators used te negative tags just to punish views they didn't agree with. But maybe an AI evaluator would be less biased?
- Gracana 9mo agoVoting can be for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes I downvote things like that because I want to bury bait that would send an argument into a well-trodden and boring direction.
- Ylpertnodi 9mo agoLet the reader decide? I - incredibly rarely - downvote. It's either vote up, or move along.
- fn-mote 9mo agoYeah… I don’t understand how anyone could look at the prevalence of advertising and affiliate links on the internet and believe they would for some reason stay away from the LLM products. Sure Sam Altman and his $200/mo subscribers won’t see them, but it was clear they were coming for free users.
- wnevets 9mo ago>$200/mo subscribers won’t see them Yet. Amazon Prime has ads despite it being a paid service.
- bhaak 9mo agoWhen you don't know how to monetize your service, you add ads.
- dktp 9mo agoFrom a very entertaining Matt Levine article (https://archive.is/8QYxl https://archive.is/8QYxl) > In a science fiction story, if you invented a superintelligent robot and asked it how to make money, it might come up with cool never-before-seen ideas, or at least massive fun market manipulation. But in real life, if you train a large language model on the internet and ask it how to make money, it will say “advertising, affiliate shopping links and porn.” That’s the lesson the internet teaches! But I think it makes a lot of sense for very popular consumer products. In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT etc exist for free, but with ads, rather than not exist at all. Preferably with an option to pay and remove ads Nowadays I'm happy to pay for Youtube premium or LLM, but back during my student days I could not really afford it - and I'm glad there was a free tier (with ads)
- rcMgD2BwE72F 9mo ago>In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT I don't use any of these except YouTube (if only I could find the content elsewhere…) and I still pay for them when I purchase anything advertised on these properties because, of course, the companies advertising on Google makes all their customers pay for the free (lol) services. All advertising expenses are included in the price of the products, even if you never saw any ads. We could easily charge for each of these services and still have them. Advertising is not necessary at all. It's just a way to make others pay for your services. It's a free riding problem to externalize costs on those who don't partake in the scheme. Pay your share and don't call free what others will subsidize. Unless if a public service and we collectively agree on the split (vote and taxes, which we can debate publicly)
- dktp 9mo agoRight. But a good portion of the world can't afford the premium and having access to these services is still valuable. For every broke student or someone from a poor background, who probably don't make any money for the company (due to not buying advertised stuff), there's someone from a well off background, who will more than subsidize it by virtue of clicking on a lawyer ad (or whatever) Nowadays I'm happy to pay, but that wasn't always the case. And I personally think that having an ad tier and fee tier is fine. Serves everyone
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- carcabob 9mo agoIf ads are clearly labeled as "ad" or "sponsored", and they only appear for free users, I think seeing ads is a pretty reasonable price to pay for those who want to use the service for free. If they're not labeled, or are shown even to paying users, I think that's a problem.
- whiplash451 9mo agoThe article says they will be clearly labeled and only for free accounts
- ehhthing 9mo agoThey will also appear to users paying $8/month, not just free.
- dangus 9mo agoSounds like the “pay enough to get better models but not remove ads” tier, kind of like the basic Netflix plan.
- hedora 9mo agoAnd if you ask chatgpt about major sponsors, a few years from now, it’ll honestly answer, even if that means badmouthing them, etc. Also, everyone gets a free pony.
- Rebelgecko 9mo agoSometimes it's a fallacy, but sometimes the slope really is slippery (see: cable TV, Netflix, etc)
- gpt5 9mo agoAll ads start as clearly labeled and distinctive. Then via the magic of iteration and A/B testing they magically evolve to become visually indistinguishable from the rest of the content except for what’s required by law.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo agoAI is so life changing that nobody wants to pay for it.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- miltonlost 9mo agoAds and erotica! The two best ways of monetizing life-changing tech and not puffed up hype!
- deadbabe 9mo agoI have made some purchasing decisions on expensive products based on analysis ChatGPT has done for me, if they can capitalize on that, it could be a decent way to make some money, as long as they remain unbiased and basically just function as an affiliate marketer. Sometimes I do want to be sold on something.
- cocoto 9mo agoWhat is the point for a company to pay OpenAI for products that it would recommend anyway? Companies are going to pay only if they can add bias to the results otherwise there is no point.
- razingeden 9mo agoMany of the advertising targets (you) will have confessed or indirectly revealed many of their aspirations, interests, hobbies, health, life and relationship problems and preferences in “chat” In a way they can’t get due to increased use of ad blockers or tightening restrictions on data brokers (California and EU GPDR) etc. So it’ll be very competitive for an advertiser to go with your ai “friend” who knows all about your hemmorhoids, booze and sex problems. All of which Google and Meta can infer or at least pin on you via guilt by association. Meta screwed that one by breaking up known connections and communities and putting AI slop and promoted content front and center . They can infer less from who you know or interact with because they stopped caring about connecting you to real humans you actually know, years ago. Banning all your friends and breaking up all those core groups for voting wrong or thinking wrong or whatever more closely suited their interests and agendas at the time. It might know what I do for work or living based on what I ask for help with etc.
- A_D_E_P_T 9mo agoOpenAI is in a tough spot. I just canceled my $200/month GPT-Pro subscription. 5.2-Pro is in decline -- it has been getting noticeably worse at a steady rate since introduction. At this point, it's not appreciably better for most queries than Claude 4.5 Opus, and Opus is roughly 10x faster.
- the__alchemist 9mo agoNoticed the same. Also, I noticed the same with the prev version, immediately improved when switching to the new 5.2. The smoking gun is the time. If I ask it a question that's subtle in "thinking" mode and it starts replying in a few seconds, the answer will probably be trash. I'm almost sure they degrade the models over time.
- IAmGraydon 9mo agoAn interesting approach - start strong when everyone is running benchmarks, taper off through the life of the release, introduce new version that is no better than the last version but it magically seems much better by comparison to the degraded previous version. Rinse, repeat, grift.
- weinzierl 9mo agoMy impression is that recently ChatGPT tries to avoid going out to research on the Internet as long as it can. I have to tell it to pull info from the web or verify its answers on the web explicitly. Could it be that they are trying to save traffic?
- probably_wrong 9mo agoMy non-existent marketing instinct would tell me that they are trying to keep you inside the app to convince you that ChatGPT is the internet, the same way some people wouldn't know there's life outside Facebook. My grumpy instinct tells me they know that they're poisoning the internet and they have given out on trying to weed out the fake websites from the real ones.
- 9mo ago
- IAmGraydon 9mo agoAt least they’re speed running their downfall.
- tagami 9mo agoAd Generated Income
- Hobadee 9mo agoWhy is this news? I saw ads on ChatGPT months ago...
- AndyKelley 9mo agoGood thing I didn't develop an unnecessary dependency on this product, so now I don't have to suffer through its enshittification. It's almost like it was obvious this was going to happen years ago. By the way don't sleep on this detail: > The banner ads will appear in the coming weeks for logged-in users of the free version of ChatGPT *as well as the new $8 per month ChatGPT Go plan* Even if you pay for the product, you're still the product. If we don't own our software, our software will own us.
- jug 9mo agoThat means they're in a bad shape because this was labeled a last resort by Sam himself in 2024.
- neuroelectron 9mo agoDoes anybody else think that OpenAI is lowering their output speed so you have to spend more time on the site?
- riazrizvi 9mo agoI’d rather they served ads. The economy is somewhat broken right now, with the way these things are bypassing all regular information channels. This will hopefully create lots and lots of new business for 3rd parties again. Ideally, they’ll introduce a whole new level of targeting relevance, which will be good for both advertisers and prospects.
- _kidlike 9mo agothese ads don't solve the broken economy. The original creators of some content that was stolen by OpenAI will not get a piece of the ad pie.
- riazrizvi 9mo agowe’re talking about different things. there’s meritocratic fairness where producers are paid fairly for their work, and there’s a functioning economy, where there are simply enough economic opportunities to sustain established norms of commercial participation by the broad population.
- dbtc 9mo agoThinking about the power and reach of political ads served by social media companies over the past 10 years, this is gonna be a whole nother bucket of worms.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- alexwrboulter 9mo agoI'll be interested to see how long the ads remain blockable, if at all, by adblockers (on the web UI, at least). Or to put it another way, I'll be interested to see how long before the ads become inseparable from the actual content of the response.
- RobRivera 9mo agoThis comment brought to you by Carls Jr
- phist_mcgee 9mo agoBrawno, it's got what plants crave.
- Sharlin 9mo ago"I’ll get back to your question in a second, but before that a word from our sponsors…"
- deepdarkforest 9mo agoI wonder if using a local llm to override the ads would work. A finetuned one for removing ads will probably appear soon
- candiddevmike 9mo agoHow will you know your response doesn't contain an ad? I see it as the responses eventually mimicking all of the marketing spam posts, where company Y compares it's competitors poorly or does a thought leadership piece on how you can do X by hand or have their product do X for you.
- mcintyre1994 9mo agoI’d be curious what proportion of their usage is on the mobile app and doesn’t need to worry about a significant number of users having adblockers. My instinct would be probably a decent majority is mobile, but not as high as something like Facebook, but that’s just a guess.
- hsaliak 9mo agoIt's not about how it starts. It always starts small and measured, but once you open up to ads, you open up the pandora's box of enshittification paths.
- tomhow 9mo agoPreviously (yesterday): Our approach to advertising - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649577 - Jan 2026 (227 comments)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agoArs now requires a user-agent header
- nunez 9mo agoIn six months, we will hear about how OpenAI innovatively created an AI ad auction and marketplace that, effectively, enables companies to purchase ad space within the inference pipeline, complete with "anonymous" demographic targeting and all the advertising fun things that Google and Meta are frightened of.