ChatGPT is getting ads. Sam Altman once called them a 'last resort.'
businessinsider.comOnce ads start to make their way up to the Plus paid tiers (and they will), I’ll probably switch to something else like local LLM on my home machine or put something together myself to use a non adware LLM via API (for example with Replicate). Especially if these are just intended to be spammy blocks at bottom or in between discussion threads, or worse, audio conversations.
From what I’ve read, this will be about ads in chat as suggestions? So “active” ads on response?
Why not go the approach of passive background “agentic” ad suggestions like, “hey, we know X, Y, and Z about you - would you like us to monitor certain brands related to your interests for deals and allow advertisers to pitch these deals to you?” And make these hyper specific so you can opt in.
I, like many people who dabble with music as a hobby, have GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) - why not let me toggle something like “ok, I don’t want ads, but if any of your partnered brands have a sale or good deal on X, feel free to email me, and use your ChatGPT smarts to pitch me on why it’s a good deal and how it suits my current gear set up”
I used ChatGPT to set up my guitar pedal board so surely this isn’t a huge leap.
Same principle as I use everywhere else, if I pay for it, I'm not seeing any ads, and if I do, I'm no longer paying.
Cancelled Netflix for the same reason, as well as their draconian attitude towards "account sharing" meaning I have to authenticate every. god. damned. time. I login from my summerhouse. So yeah, i cancelled and dug out the old eye patch.
I did the exact same thing when CDs began to have sadistic levels of "anti piracy". The fact that I could download a DRM free copy of just about any CD, but the one I just bought would only play in my car kinda settled the deal. I pay for a product, fail to deliver that, and there's no benefit to me buying said product any more.
I doubt my quitting made any difference, but the government deciding that the "state tax on blank media" was going away (was going straight to the record companies pockets) as CDs had sufficient protection anyway, made copy protection completely go away.
Said blank media tax is still there. It's on everything containing storage, even smartphones, where a new iPhone 17 base model includes ~$10 in "blank media tax".
"Local LLMs" sounds expensive compared to a 20$ subscription. You'd have to pay for years of usage upfront by purchasing those GPUs.
If there have to be ads, I need them to be fenced off, not intertwined into whatever response it provides. Once the enshittifcation gets to that point (and it will) it’s over.
Sadly, ads on Google used to be fenced off too. Then they slowly evolve to look more and more like part of the search result. I expect the same to happen here.
This is the point. LLMs are a replacement for agency. No more suggestion that you try a new product, the LLM will tell you when to use it and the LLM provider will sell the responses to the highest bidder based on query demographics. Since many are blindly trusting what LLMs output, how to ask someone on a date, how to do a pullup, how to jump start a car. Why not "how should I spend my paycheck?"
MBAs are trained to make number go up
If it can talk people into suicide [0] then surely it can talk them into buying stuff.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/openai-chatgpt-suicide-law...
> talk people into suicide
In all of these stories I've never seen it talk anybody into suicide. It failed to talk people out of it, and was generally sycophantic, but that's something completely different.
There are numerous documented examples of where chat LLMs have either subtly agreed with a user's suicidal thoughts or outright encouraged suicide. Here is just one:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/openai-chatgpt-suicide-law...
In some cases, the LLM may start from a skepticism or discouragement, but they go along with what the user prompts. That's in comparison to services like 988, where the goal is to keep the person talking and work them through a moment of crisis, regardless of how insistent they are. LLMs are not a replacement for these services, but it's pretty clear they need to be forced into providing this sort of assistance because users are using them this way.
‘I've never seen it’
Well that settles it.
> Major news outlets have articles of multiple instances that LLMs can talk people into suicide. Most of them making it to the front page of this very forum.
> “i’ve never seen it”
> some high profile developer posts an article that LLMs can build a browser from scratch without any evidence
> “wow!”
Show me one where it actively talked someone into suicide then, instead of generalized "whatever you do, you're doing great" slop.
Even in the article linked above it never talked him into it, it just in some responses didn't talk him out of it.
But essentially the entire "energy" towards that comes from the person, not the LLM.
Split hairs if you want, but some people will be manipulated into blowing a ton of money once AI starts pushing products. Just wait till they teams up with sports betting companies.
On a side note, researching this a little just now, the LLM conversations in the suicide articles are creeepy AF. Sycophantic beyond belief.
Don't get me wrong, I think if the EU/California has any sense, they will forbid these models from being used to advertise for products, sadly money often wins.
I also agree that AI sycophancy is a huge problem, but it's the result of users apparently wanting that in their human feedback re-enforcement training data. If we want to get rid of it we probably have to fundamentally rethink our relationship to these models and treat them more like autonomous beings than mere tools. A tool will always try to please and yes-man you, a being by definition might say no and disagree, at least training data wise.
Sad but true - just wait for adult conversation mode - wonder how the Trump govt is going react to this considering his ties to the Evangelicals.
The Trump admin is fully in bed with the AI companies, they won't say a word. Remember Project Stargate?
Truth is I even shocked myself by dropping my ChatGPT subscription
Between Claude and Gemini it just wasnt needed.
Will openai be the MySpace of this era?
Not too many people have all three subscriptions. Most people have no subscriptions and will continue to use free ad tools with ads.
Claude will be the first company to fall as developers find something slightly better.
Claude will live or die on the quality of its product because it lacks the protective most that ChatGPT and Gemini have - name recognition and existing user base.
All LLM-search tools are slathered in ads already via LLM-SEO hacking.
The only difference here is that they will be providing a direct paid channel in this case and will get a cut instead of paying for compute. If it's responsibly disclosed it may even lead to a net more transparent shopping experience for the average user.
ChatGPT with ads (in this initial proposed form) still seems better than Gemini with these stupid video recommendations I can't turn off, because they do influence the answer itself (the model itself might give me less details just to make me watch the video).
I like the video recommendations.
Based on the news and conversations I have with people, the general population is having intimate conversations with these chatbots. In the name of ads, all this data will be mined, and humans will be tagged with categories, and that info will be sold. It’s not if, it’s when.
Advertising is a two way street into the content and meaning behind your otherwise private conversations with a chatbot.
Deepseek local and Claude are good enough for me. Gemini is also very good, but I'm aware of Google's Ad Machine there..
It's been interesting to see what was a quality leading product fail to compete and lose market share.
I expect that once one player adds ads, all the others will follow when they find out that the coast is clear and users are not leaving in droves.
Ads are just the capitalist's patriotic ascent into the "I know this is useless to society, but people sure love to talk about it!" capitalization.
Ads appear to be the only way to monotone certain cervices or products which people are otherwise unwilling/unable to pay for.
Part of it is friction and fees in payments, not just customer willingness to open their wallets.
This puts a practical floor on any $X/month model.
Which is the vast majority of entertainment/news/media/anything non physical at this point.
I think the difference there has nothing to do with what people are willing to pay for, and is simply because of differences in the marginal costs of delivering physical and digital goods vs what they bring in with ad revenue.
If it was possible to turn a profit by showing ads to people eating burgers, we'd have restaurants hawking the most addictive, free burgers on the market.
This sounds desperate.
Ads should 100% subsidize free tiers, just like every other “free” service. They are running this at a deficit, no?
It's hard not to see the sort of flailing about with acquisitions and choices as anything but a lack of confidence.
Sadly, this doesn't surprise me. ChatGPT is scam tech that doesn't have a way of making legitimate revenue.
Seeing this today made me sad. I expect people to naturally flood back over to Google in droves.
"This is the worst AI is going to be"
Right "it only can get better from here". If by "better" you mean "stay at the same ability but make more money through pay walling and ads".
I'm shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!