>Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea?
I mean I do. And you do. Probably a lot of people in this thread. I felt that way about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on.
I think you're right that these ads will be, in a sense, worse, but not by the metrics that matter to OpenAI.
> about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on
I think the main challenge here is that Netflix works around one of many ways to access entertainment. So if one service starts to show recommendations in that limited context of user data they collect - it's still has negative potentials but it's easier to regulate and there are alternatives.
In the case of LLMs, we have service that are aiming to replace both the browser and the search engine. This means ending up in a situation where your entire access to knowledge and the world takes place via "AI". And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities. I've read and seen a lot of sci-fi and dystopian history novels (actually read, not LLM-summarized for me) to know this is a very end-game kind of situation.
Netflix never introduced ads in the ad free service. They introduced a new lower tier price with ads that if you were an existing customer, you were none the wiser.