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 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've heard this before from other companies.

OpenAI should just reject all advertisements. That's the only real solution.

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?

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".

I've heard this before...

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.

This means little. Anyone that has your data could potentially feed it in to do their own task.

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.

> 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.

The free and $8 new “Go” tier will include ads.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

They didn’t even start with free, already a paid subscription included.

So ChatGPT constantly ending all responses with tangents and followups is not for engagement?

(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.)

I'm out.

I mean, they certainly know that introducing ads with be a huge motivation for consumers to seek other options.

The primary differentiator of OpenAI is first mover advantage; the product itself is not particularly unique anymore.

IMHO consumers will quickly realize that switching to an alternative AI provider is easy and probably fun.

This seems premature to give up their moat in the name of revenue. Are they feeling real financial pressure all of the sudden? Maybe I'm missing something. Looks like a big win for Google and Anthropic.

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.

What I'm not okay with is being served adds using codex cli, or codex cli gather data outside of my context to send to advertisers. So as long as they're not doing that, I won't complain.

If they start doing that, I'll complain, and I'll need to more heavily sandbox it.

More related, I pay for Kagi, because google results are horrible.

More related, Chatgpt isn't the only model out there, and I've just recently stopped using 5 because it's just slow and there are other models that come back and work just as well. So when Chatgpt starts injecting crap, I'll just stop using them for something else.

What would you do if every time you walked into Walmart and the greeter spit in your face and told you to go F yourself, would you still shop there?

If no services remain I’ll run one of my own in the cloud or my server.

Fuck. Ads.