alt Hacker NewsOur approach to advertising
Comments
People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this.
ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ads in your ChatGPT in 2030. The good news is you're still going to have a job in 2030.
> You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers.
> we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.
There is a severe disjoint between these two statements: the advertiser now knows what your conversation was about! This gives a lot of leverage to ad campaigns to design the targeting criteria very specifically crafted to identify the exact behavioral and interest segments they want.
Can't wait for it to start telling people that Abraham Lincoln's favourite game was raid shadow legends.
It is over.
Edit: they made sure to use the word "trust" 5 times because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are.
This Black Mirror episode is so track from being sci-fi to reality. This will happen in the long horizon with at least the way LLMs are chatting with us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
"We’ll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that’s ad-free." Plus will be next.
I work on ads as a SWE at a company youve heard of. Albeit, its been less than a few years for me.
Maybe OpenAI does things different, but as soon as an OKR around ad performance gets committed to, the experience will degrade. Sure they're not selling data, however they'll almost certainly have a direct response communication where advertisers tell Open AI what and when youve interacted with their products. Ads will be placed and displayed in increasingly more aggressive positions, although it'll start out non intrusive.
Im curious how their targeting will work and how much control they'll give advertisers to start. Will they allow businesses of all sizes? Will they allow advertisers to control how their ads work? I bet Amazon is foaming at the mouth to get their products fed into chat gpt results.
Interesting that OpenAI is trying to hammer the point that they won't sell user data to advertisers.
That's how all the major ads platforms work. I don't personally agree that it constitutes "selling your data" but certainly people describe it that way for Google/Meta ads which function the same way. By framing it this way they're clearly trying to fool users who really bought into the messaging that Google et al literally sell user data when they only provide targeting. I guess the hope is that the cleaner reputation of OpenAI will mean people think there's some actual difference here.
> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.
Are they mincing words here? By selling your data they mean they'll never package the raw chats and send them whoever is buying ads. Ok, neither does Google. But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? "See this is not your data, it's just preference bits".
Lots of negative comments here. OpenAI has to make a move, they are not profitable and have massive costs and debt. I think this one of the least bad moves, given all data that they have on users. They could have monetized their data so much more, and sooner.
> In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay.
This single sentence probably took so many man-hours. I completely understand why they’re trying to integrate ads but this feels like a generational run for a company founded with the purpose of safely researching superintelligence.
I think Google has already shown that in the long run, people accept ads and prefer them to paying a subscription fee. If that weren’t true, then YouTube Premium would have double-digit % of youtube users and Kagi Search would be huge.
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.
I've heard this before from other companies.
OpenAI should just reject all advertisements. That's the only real solution.
Once they put ads in it the algorithms will optimize for engagement and time on platform, not returning useful (let alone correct) information. This works for Facebook cause Facebook is essentially entertainment, but I think this will kill ChatGPT as a useful tool.
This is merely the first step.
The next step is to have them natively in the output. And it'll happen at a scale never seen.
Google had a lot more push-back, because they used to be the entity that linked to other websites, so them showing the AI interview was a change of path.
OpenAI embedding the advertisements in a natural way is much much easier for them. The public already expects links to products when they ask for advice, so why not change the text a little bit to glorify a product when you're asking for a comparison between product A & B.
"Ads are always separate and clearly labeled."
I've heard this before...
“Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads.“ Yet.
The free and $8 new “Go” tier will include ads.
"Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible."
Also, anything that benefits OpenAI or keeps our runway just a bit longer is (by definition) in support of our mission, so we can do anything that we want and say that it is for the good of humanity.
Quoting Simon & Garfunkel:
> And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall
We shall be good. Pinky promise.
To the people trying to read between the lines here, do you think OpenAI cares about what they said or didn't say and won't do a 180 if it means more profits? Like a blog post will stop them?
I remember when I was defending openai for still being relatively open because they are not gatekeeping tech advancements made in model training or inference, but their patent count is shooting up and I am sure the next revolution they will discover will get patented as well. Having the name OpenAI will feel so weird in a couple more years when it'll be the complete opposite with no way to justify the "open" in their name.
I think advertising was inevitable for this platform. It is highly surprising that this was not introduced with a new groundbreaking model or new service as a form of justification.
Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely), they are under immense immediate financial pressure to produce revenue (I presume most likely) or there is simply no development on the horizon big enough to justify the shift - so just do it now.
I already don't use ChatGPT. I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts. Switching to a different interface is so easy many people will. (You don't need to self host. T3 Chat, for example.) This is the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT.
Its going to be interesting to see what shenanigans one can do by paying to advertise on OpenAI
Of course they are going to "anonymise" the chats, and only extract keywords summaries.
But, as some people are generally more candid with chatbots, de-anonymisation through keyword selection is trivially possible.
It won't just stay at ultra precise demographic selection (ie all males 35-40, living in london, worried about hair loss). They will offer scenarios that facebook/instagram could only infer/dream of
"middle aged woman with disposable income unhappy with spouse."
Where it gets interesting is how they will provide proof that the advert has landed/reached eyeballs.
Feels like half of the goal here is to give people more incentive to upgrade over the free tier.
100% bullshit.
> we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay
No, that is not why they're doing it. They're doing it to make money.
> Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity
No, that is not their mission. Their mission is to make money.
If they wanted to benefit all humanity they would axe the entire operation, do a complete 180, and use all their money to fight as hard as they can against everyone else who is doing what they're doing now.
I wonder if the adverts in the "personal super-assistant", per the blog post, ("that helps you do almost anything"!) will have the same triggers as the shopping assistant, which pops up underneath messages right now in the web UI.
When first trying 5.2, on a "Pro" plan, I was - and still am - able to trigger the shopping assistant via keyword-matching, even if the conversation context, or the prompt itself, is wildly inappropriate (suicide, racism, etc).
Keyword-matching seems a strange ad strategy for a (non-profit) company selling QKV. It's all very confusing!
Hopefully, for fans of personal super-assistants--and advertising--worldwide, this will improve now that ads have been formalised.
I'm surprised, and more than a little bit relieved that they didn't allow chats to be steered by ads. This could have been a whole new kind of marketing, where product plugs are e.g. slipped into the system prompt and come across as sincere recommendations. I have to wonder if this is still coming down the road.
I guess in the meantime, they will be able to use chat histories to personalize ads on a whole new level. I bet we will see some screenshots of uncomfortably relevant ads in the coming months.
Seems like a big opportunity for Google to consider keeping Gemini ad-free as a differentiator. They can afford to burn cash on it for a long time to come if they choose to do so.
> We do not optimize for time spent in ChatGPT.
So ChatGPT constantly ending all responses with tangents and followups is not for engagement?
I'm kind of surprised this didn't happen sooner.
From an ethical standpoint, I think it's .. murky. Not ads themselves, but because the AI is, at least partially, likely trained on data scraped from the web, which is then more or less regurgitated (in a personalized way) and then presented with ads that do not pay the original content creators. So it's kind of like, lets consume what other people created, repackage it, and then profit off of it.
>In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers
They didn’t even start with free, already a paid subscription included.
Yup. Enshittification, right on track.
(I continue to be shocked how many people—who should know better—are in denial that the entire "industry" of Generative AI is completely and utterly unsustainable and furthermore on a level of unsustainability we've never before seen in the history of computer technology.)
This seems bad for OpenAI. If ads are the way to profitability, Google has a 25 year head-start.
There will be an explosion in adblocking software... and who will pay $8 a month for an ad infected product.
This is going to be very bad. Clearly defined ads is the start but they will eventually mixed ads into responses in the form of sponsored content. It's just the natural progression of things.
Not to long and we are going to start seeing LTO (LLM Training Optimization) become the new SEO.
They are free to do whatever they want, but please keep that crap out from paid plans.
I think they realize the end of their moat has come. I see 5.2 doesn't try as hard and gives worse answers. I don't like Elon, but I've found Grok to be better on many questions.
Wonder how long it will take someone to find a prompt to get rid of ads? Im guessing less than 3 days
I question whether it matters any more. AI chat is clearly going to be the search interface of the future. phones are the channel for users with Chrome/android being one half and iphone being the other. Google just signed up Apple to be the engine for siri. We also know that users rarely change defaults.
so, google would appear to have boxed out openai from the #1 use case, and already have all the pieces in place to monetize it. This move by OAI isnt surprising, but is it too late to matter?
Ongoing discussion on the same, albeit linked to a news article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649644
> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.
This means little. Anyone that has your data could potentially feed it in to do their own task.
“Conversation privacy: We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.”
The same sleight of hand that’s been used by surveillance capitalists for years. It’s not about “selling your data” because they have narrowly defined data to mean “the actual chats you have” and not “information we infer about you from your usage of the service,” which they do sell to advertisers in the form of your behavioral futures.
Fuck all this. OpenAI caved to surveillance capitalism in record time.
https://chatgpt.com/share/696a8c52-f29c-800d-b597-93dfde0c30...
What you’re reacting to isn’t just “ads.” It’s the feeling of: Someone monetizing the collective output of human thought while quietly severing the link back to the humans who produced it.
That triggers a very old and very valid moral instinct.
Why “sleazy” is an accurate word here
“Sleazy” usually means: technically allowed strategically clever morally evasive
Enshittified, the bright golden AI age began to brown, and regression to the mean once again cast another bleak spell onto humanity. And with that, just as quickly as it broke, another AI winter began. As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value.
It’s probably best not to become too reliant on this technology. We all know where it is going.
This sounds exactly like what Google used to say about search results. Just a few ads, clearly separated from organic results, never detracting from the core mission of providing the most effective access to all the world’s information. (And certainly not driven by a secret profile of you based on pervasive surveillance of your internet activity.)