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.
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".
"Actual" athletes only sprint for a few minutes at a time, not really comparable with the hydration needs of a cyberathlete on their hundred and third consecutive two week sprint.
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."
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because
when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
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.
And inversely, steer away from (named competition).
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.
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
I've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.
Still says something about their engineering culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.
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:
Kind of ironic that an article that criticizes Google turning into an ad machine opens up with a “we have noticed you have an ad blocker installed” whole page pop-up
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
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?
at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai
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.
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.
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.
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!
Same I was expecting to see the materials all ready to be purchased at Home Depot, that would actually be useful. One click buy all the stuff we just talked about.
"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."
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.
It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.
> 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.
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?
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."
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
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.
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!
“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.”
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.
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.
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?
>In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?
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.
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 said it on another comment, but OpenAI doesn't seem like the type of company to value human oversight and "Go beyond keywords with richer context signals" sure sounds like the regular model with a specific system prompt.
>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.
To be fair, there's a lot of wild shit in the ads of Google and Facebook, and they seem to avoid too much scrutiny. Maybe it's not gonna be "cards against humanity" esque fuckup with a problematic chat and a (originally) benign ad. There could be some sad teen talking about bullying and they get an ad for the Gen Z equivalent of The Turner Diaries and the local gun store.
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.
I actually didn’t mind ads on google for a long while. Then at some point there were no organic results above the fold and the ads were huge and in high quantity. The widgets took over the top result real estate, to show more ads. Then it became obvious the organic results weren’t important to them, getting me to click on an ad was more important. Ads are a sickness fueled by quarterly earnings calls. It will always devolve into just 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?
The google ad revenue and Meta ad revenue is hundreds of billions a year.
They have behavioural experts who know how mainstream minds work and how to manipulate.
Remembers ads are predominately not for the educated and intelligent, that type of person will think critically. People who are more naive are the golden gooses
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.
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 :)
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
The same way they do with Google Ads - they won't. In my experience (with small companies) most people running ads have little idea what they are doing and don't monitor the results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting... however, given that it's still the advertiser's choice of what "advertiser-provided context hints" [1] I assign to the ad... what's stopping me from putting "lowes, rona, home hardware" in the context hints of my Home Depot ad? If the LLM is talking about my competitors, of course I want my brand copy yelling louder than ChatGPT's waffle-y responses.
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!
Before, I was just trying to get my link above their link on the search results page... but the competitor's ad copy was still there and readable. You're telling me the AI is going to downplay expectations for the competitor for me, and I get to add whatever text I want afterwards?
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.
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:
The announced rules[0] are interesting, in that they claim that sensitive chats (like the ones you pointed out) will not have ads shown next to them.
But - wait for it - memories and past chat history are used for targeting, so you're not going to get your Kalshi ad inside of your "how do I pay back my debt" chat, but maybe the next morning, in your "random cooking question" chat.
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.