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 being recommended POWERADE®—a product also 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.

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.

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 is maybe not extremely on-topic, but when creating an account on their platform, their "Time zone" field is sorted in alphabetical order of CITY NAMES which are listed AFTER the timezone name and are not capitals, which is absolutely wild to me.

If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!

    Atlantic Standard Time - St Vincent
    Central Standard Time - Swift Current
    Central Standard Time - Tegucigalpa
    Atlantic Time - Thule
    Pacific Time - Tijuana
    Eastern Time - Toronto
    Atlantic Standard Time - Tortola
    Pacific Time - Vancouver
    Whitehorse Time - Whitehorse
    Central Time - Winnipeg
    Alaska Time - Yakutat

Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.

Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!

I don't understand how this will interact with llms.txt files (or if it does/will)

Ideally AI should scrape 400 different competing websites, those that have well-designed llms.txt files based on my query should rise towards the top, no?

I understand this is incredibly oversimplified but something like that should be the goal.

I'm confused. This is (publicly stated) the last resort for OpenAI, right?

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.

Praying that this means the bubble is finally (inevitably) beginning to burst.

Well that surely isn't a good sign of their financial health.

I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.

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.

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?

Well it is pretty good at confirming the right ammunition for a school shooting so that’s one potential market at least.

https://youtu.be/IbG-JGdGniY

(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)

I think at some point we have to give up the “we are creating AGI” and admit it was “a better search engine than Google, we can cash grab their ad revenue”

lol they couldn't even go six months after Anthropic's superbowl ad predicting this exact crap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA

At least the sponsored posts are currently visibly highlighted. As a user, I would quickly be trained to avoid the first N sponsored suggestions and skip the first non-sponsored suggestion. What's the goal here?

One step closer to Black Mirror's 'Common People'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

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.

How long until advertisement impacts chatgpt answer, I mean not just adding a sponsored link at the end but changing it's answer.

We've seen it with Google, money is too hard to resist. Enshitification is coming !

Thanks god for the open Chinese models, they are the future. All hail the CCP.

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.

Here we go.

It's one of the 2 endgames of all companies involved in the AI race:

- ADS

- make the users that pay for tokens find a PMF for a product/service and then make the product/service their self

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.

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

This will definitely not break the model's impartiality at all!

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 :)

I really hope pro subscriptions don't include ads going forward...

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

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.

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.

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?

“ Go beyond keywords with richer context signals”; hint: we know everything about our users

God damn it. Local models can't become viable soon enough.

We've tried them. So far quite expensive with not much return. This channel might not work as well as search.

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.

    > # 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-...

So guess OpenAI is unable to run millions of agents and take over the world.

And ads it is

Best not buy the IPO shares I think

Turns out, attention is all you need.

Aaaand... it's not available in your country. Only available in: Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States.

Which accounts to approximately 8.02% of the global population. Or 37.9% of world nominal GDP. Based on ChatGPT.

"Remember When" is the lowest form of conversation. "Let's sell some Ads" is the lowest form of monetization.

"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.

Cool, so now that open weight models are closing in on SOTA, SOTA enshittifies.

Now for the crash

Who would use a chatgpt ad blocking chrome extension if i made one?

Adblocker for chatgpt in 3, 2, 1...

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.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716063

Yeah, that ought to boost the IPO.

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.

"relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience"

They took that from Google!

Aka acceptable ads.

Funny how they always drive and thrive on pestering people.

Slippery slope ...

Next up: upgrade to Pro to disable memory.

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?

Mark your calendar. When the next generation asks, you can tell them it was today when the AI enshittification era truly began.

Just upgraded to their 100$ plans. Time to reconsider.

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.

ChatGPT has replaced 90% of Google for me ... that is another 1T source of income for OpenAI

Well. that's going to cause hilarious results in all those unchecked spam bots & slop sites.

Coming soon: advertise in local event slop posters!

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.

So the ads are going to stay separate from the chat itself... For now ;) then they'll start playing by Google's playbook

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