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 on 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

    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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Well it is pretty good at recommending 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.

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?

    > # 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?

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-...

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

I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.

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

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

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

RIP

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?

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.

"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.

And the chat results will not be influenced by advertisers (right!)

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

It’s funny that the link got blocked by my Adblock already

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

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?

Not new. At least a month old.

Related from April:

Ads in ChatGPT FAQ

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

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.

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.

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