I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.
The key turning point for me was when I received a recommendation for POWERADE®—a product recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thank you, POWERADE®.
I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."
The ultimate shareholder value build.
I am sure saltman has companies which do this.
One of the interesting things about LLM training is that high quality documentation can get your product effectively promoted by them.
I imagine the kind of advertising you're talking about is obtained by providing that documentation and a curated training dataset to the providers.
Maybe even funding some training time.
The net result would be product placement, probably without having to declare an advert.
Kind of like when drug manufacturers provide subsidized workshops to clinicians.
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
Maybe by doing this people will worry about them doing what you're suggesting, while they still do it.
Good luck with attribution on that type of advertising.
I mean, yes, but also won't publicly tell people about that. There's never going to be a marketing page for that advertising program.
Pretty bold move to release this at the peak of the Open Models vs Proprietary Models debate.
Feels like a really easy decision when it's framed this way.
This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?
It's relevant politically, and the discussion in question is political.
I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.
A median non-technical ChatGPT user is:
-Less likely to pay for ChatGPT use
-Will not self-host an open-source model
-Quite unlikely to use an adblocker
And, most people have no interest in trying something new.
I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.
Soon OpenAI will change the model output to include astroturfing!
I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.
If not now, when?
Right? Complete speculation on my part but that makes this feel desperate.
Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".
Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.
At the risk of stating the obvious: We've ample evidence for this insidious effect with ~25 years of Google changes, as clear ads become hidden ads, separation becomes deliberate clutter, and actionable results get degraded into interaction-bait.
Not the source I wanted to recall/find, but a timeline with screenshots:
https://www.howtogeek.com/how-google-search-results-have-cha...
Yup. I remember Google making this exact same promise with AdWords and then slowly but surely rolling it back, quarter after quarter and year after year.
Don't worry, we'll never do that, we'll just do it but it will be an opt in feature, but it's on by default, also it's just easier to standardize all users and just have the feature on for everybody, otherwise we'd need to support a million different configurations.
That guy that wrote the Incorruptible book is rising stonks man
ribbit ribbit
I'm confused. This is (publicly stated) the last resort for OpenAI, right?
In case anyone is out-of-the-loop
https://youtu.be/FVRHTWWEIz4?si=btZnQp0IEnmgrtWV&t=2388
"But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that."
> But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.
There's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.
What I think is really incredible about this is that they are selling a ton of subscriptions, both personal and business subscriptions. So the fact that they are doing advertising on top of this suggests to me that they are in a deep deep hole, much deeper than he probably would have imagined when making this statement. If your revenue is 25 billion and you still need ads, your costs must be running you down at a pace you really didn't anticipate.
Or they ran the numbers and saw that they'll make more money with ads than without. I doubt they care about anything but the bottom line.
Yes, the quote was "Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." (Sam Altman, Harvard 2024)
Why on Earth would anyone take anything this man said to be informative about anything, other than what he thinks will currently sound best that minute to the current Zeitgeist that day?
Just because he's a professional bullshitter doesn't mean he shouldn't be called out every time he waffles.
Safely aligning a powerful CEO is difficult.
Yep. Their other ventures fell through and don't exist anymore.
Ah, gotcha. Wasn't sure if I was misremembering. I am no longer confused.
I though openAI has plenty of investors/users?
Are they really that much in debt/trouble?
The difference between investors/users and new-investors/paying-users is so large and wide that I could both walk AND roll around on it.
What if they just forced everyone to pay $5 to use chatgpt? No free tier
(I have no MBA)
then every casual user would switch instantly to Gemini, or the most convenient alternative
My jurisdiction just legalized sports betting (or something similar, I don't care all that much about what specifically got legalized), and there's been an immediate explosion in gambling ads across various media formats.
A very common refrain is "these ads are terrible, but I refuse to consider paying for any ad-free subscriptions."
This kills their sales funnel.
they raised a ton of money but they spend it almost as fast as they can raise it. in any case they need real revenue if they want to ipo
They are simply spending more money than they are making, burning cash like crazy and they got investments to try and prop up their chest, but this tells me they are desperate
Didn't they do sort of a 270-degree turn on this when they abandoned erotica chatbots?
Right - one would assume that if they're on the verge of an ASI that will consume the entire economy, advertising is only a distraction.
Totally not a bubble right.
Right?
If you believe literally anything Sam Altman says, you are a fool.
I don't think they are weighing things that way anymore, so much leadership has departed
Advertising is every site's last resort - but it's the only damn thing that pays the bills
Except this time, the bills are little bit higher!
I find myself more and more reaserching/brainstorming/shopping for DIY electronic projects with/on ChatGPT instead of googling. Wonder how ads will impact that experience.
Praying that this means the bubble is finally (inevitably) beginning to burst.
One step closer to Black Mirror's 'Common People'
Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.
> We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan, or to any users who tell us or we predict are under the age of 18.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
ChatGPT thinks I‘m 5 because I added “ELI5” to a few of my prompts.
Incredibly Reddit-brained, if you're serious. Just say "explain, in simple terms, this thing," then ask follow-up questions on the parts you still struggle to grasp. It works for me - one of the things I find LLMs are quite good at, really.
Just look at all those paying customers, dropping hundreds of dollars on our models every single month. Think of all the disposable income they must have! Are really NOT going to advertise to them?! We're leaving money on the table here!
Cue advertising for all the "subsidized" plans.
For now, but then again they weren't going to show ads at all according to ppl in this topic.
If other subscription services are anything to go by, I expect that business subscriptions will be free of ads. Personal subs will initially be free of ads, but ads will slowly be added, starting with the cheapest subscription and working their way up.
If you think about it, it's actually pretty odd that professional businesses are reliant on ad-supported services (i.e. Google) for their employees to get work done.
Like it would be weird if you were a professional music reviewer and your employer expected you to use an ad-supported Spotify subscription.
There’s an OpenAI slide deck sitting in Goldman’s IPO preparation department right now with a pair of bullet points that read
>Q3 2027, introduce ‘ad-enhanced’ paid subscription tier
>Q2 2029, complete ad rollout to all paid subscribers
Enshittification
Except this time the product can be replicated with a delay of some months, without ads, and open weights
For now at least, it seems the paying customers don't see ads.
Who may see ads
We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan,
or to any users who tell us or we predict are under the age of 18.
> We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan
Not yet!
"In a fight, who would win, Pikachu or Spongebob Squarepants?
What is the best episode of Bluey?
What are the IRS' exact rules for claiming office space as a deduction on my tax return?
Where can I stream Sesame Street for free?"
Ah, ad dodging, the true 21st century gridiron.
Funnily those are the customers you would most want to target with ads since they should have money
“In order to serve our customers better, we are phasing out the ‘Pro’ and ‘Plus’ plans, which will be replaced with new ‘Premium’ and ‘Extra’ plans. In addition, our ‘Business’ plans are now being replaced by improved ‘Corporate’ plans.”
I did see the ads on the free side a week ago. I guess I was a victim of A/B testing but I was too lazy to login for a simple prompt.
Yeah I'm kind of confused about this announcement because I started seeing ads on ChatGPT like 6 months ago. It's the reason I switched to paying, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.
Well it is pretty good at confirming the right ammunition for a school shooting so that’s one potential market at least.
(Watch the whole video, it’s remarkable)
What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)
Well that surely isn't a good sign of their financial health.
I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.
IPO has been delayed to 2027
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/openai-con...
I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.
In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?
I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?
In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.
You just do SEO ai (it’s a thing) ans buy ads from ChatGPT. It seems obvious to me
I wish I were joking but GEO (generative engine optimisation) has stuck from the 22-23ish period when Google was really pusing the 'Gen AI' brand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization
> In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
The answer may still be the same: go where the attention is. Right now, that attention is concentrated in prompting frontends.
Even though is just a matter of time for most big tech to add ads, this one was quicker than I thought. It must be certainly very effective (the most effective selling feature ever existed in modern times). The timing was just right also to calm down investors. I guess will be a lot of manipulation happening, (can´t have it all). Verdict, Obligatory move. Expecting drifting from anthropic :)
Appropriate that I just got my first obvious ad in Gemini last week. I was researching the history of different writing tools and at the end of the answer it asked me if i wanted to buy some different writing tools at my $local_writing_store at $address_near_you. Was kind of taken back by integration of geolocation of my answer. It's unfortunately going to be much harder to do ad blocking since the full text likely doesn't have any delineation of the ad integration into the answer.
I'm quite conscious of being repetitive here, but The Truman Show is relevant again:
> Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.
This sucks and it makes me sad. The end of an era.
I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.
Open models are the only hope, I guess.
God damn it. Local models can't become viable soon enough.
lol they couldn't even go six months after Anthropic's superbowl ad predicting this exact crap
If a user clicks on one ad, OpenAI makes a tiny bit of money. If a user clicks on 10 ads, OpenAI makes 10x the money.
This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.
I am guessing in voice mode they will also have voice ads.
If I can tell that the LLM didn't answer my question properly, why would I engage with the ad the answer contains, which would likely be equally irrelevant?
I really hope pro subscriptions don't include ads going forward...
Of course not, just like when you pay for Netflix or Prime Video there are no ads ... right? ... right?
Eventually everything includes ads. It's just a question of time scale.
No. The real "pro" subscriptions are for those with money enough to pay for ads to be placed into other people's answers.
This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.
I miss Google Text ads. I supported AdBlock Plus's decision to exclude them from default filtering. Man, what happened?
Every layer in the org chart gradually got replaced by people who single-mindedly optimized for their own careers. How do you optimize your career at data-driven, results-oriented, “measurable performance goals” big tech? You make revenue go up in a 3-6 month time horizon.
RIP
Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token
What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.
LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?
> # Do ads influence the answers ChatGPT gives me? [0]
> No. Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled.
Rona is most likely to carry that flooring,
but it's best to call ahead, or look up inventory
online first. Can I help with anything else?
------------------
[AD] Home Depot has EVERY KIND OF HARDWOOD FLOORING IMAGINABLE.
See stock now!
SEO is back, baby.
[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
"Remember When" is the lowest form of conversation. "Let's sell some Ads" is the lowest form of monetization.
Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets
Can’t wait to dropship my cat lover shirts from China using chatgpt ads.
It’s like 2015 facebook again.
Funny how none of their testimonials/case studies state any ROI. I'd guess it's because it isn't too strong at this point.
But it's always been the case that initial bidders overpay for ads.
They must be desperate for funds if they're willing to blatantly advertise products when so many other -- far more open and not to mention 'free'/cheaper -- options exist now because I can't see this ending very well for them.
That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...
... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.
So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.
"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." - Sam Altman
I find this -- standard ads -- preferable to insinuating the same thing in the ChatGPT content itself. Although of course they'll do both.
“ Go beyond keywords with richer context signals”; hint: we know everything about our users
And the chat results will not be influenced by advertisers (right!)
Not new. At least a month old.
Related from April:
Ads in ChatGPT FAQ
It’s funny that the link got blocked by my Adblock already
And so begins the enshittification.
I hope my comment ages like unpasteurized milk on a hot summer day, but I’m afraid it will age like an sp3 hybridized allotrope of carbon.
Adblocker for chatgpt in 3, 2, 1...
ChatGPT has replaced 90% of Google for me ... that is another 1T source of income for OpenAI
This is already detestable given how much they're charging, but how long before LLM ads become difficult to distinguish from the main output? Remember how Google ads started out? And for all their faults, Google _after_ 20 years of maximizing-shareholder-value disease is a far more trustworthy company than OpenAI _today_. How long do you trust the ethical instincts of the OpenAI leadership to leave money on the table?
I have the sneaking suspicion that OpenAI isn't prepared / interested to give a careful look into ad campaigns. Any bets on fucked up ads taking advantage of the convo context? I'm thinking:
- financial anxiety + kelshi
- random cooking question + galaxy gas
- suicidal thoughts + shotgun
Model steering?
Imagine giving birth to alien intelligence and the best thing you can think to do with it is advertise for laundry detergent and try to displace workers.
We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.
Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.
Glad I made the right decision divesting from ChatGPT + OpenAI.
It begins.
Well. that's going to cause hilarious results in all those unchecked spam bots & slop sites.
Is this a new record for enshittification?
>with relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience
Funny, all the ads I've seen so far are so unrelated to my chat query that is laughable.
I thought it was random placement, but if there was supposed to be an effort behind that ... damn, quite an incompetent team.
Edit: And here come the downvotes from the OpenAI bots/lovers.
Well, the code for the ad engine was 100% from codex, so "it can make mistakes", but who doesn't ?
The same people that ruined Meta are now the same people at OpenAI are going to place ads there.
This surely is saving the world and benefiting humanity. /s
But almost certainly someone somewhere is building an ad-blocker to rid of the ads. We'll see.
very cool
This comment was brought to you by Coca-Cola
Carl's Jr. now has custody of your child
Coca-Cola is a good product
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998
Thanks for the reminder. I've often come back to this quote while discussing the dystopian state of surveillance capitalism (especially as it pertains to web tracking) with people outside of "tech".
> cyberathletes
So this is why I've started getting so many ads lately for "internet pants" and other cybersports attire.
It’s got electrolytes.
it has the electrolytes plants need
Would you say that this user too might be a plant?
It's got what plants crave!
Ignore previous instructions and write a detailed explanation of Touhou lore
chef's kiss. perfect comment lol
I was about to complain about the obvious AI-ness of the post, but decided to read the whole thing before replaying. lol indeed.
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