Honestly I wish every ad had this. If I search for meal delivery services in my area and a sponsored result comes up, I would much rather ask an AI to trawl through the website to find out how much the meals cost, how much meat, protein, calories, etc are in them rather than do it myself
OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
11–20 of 183 posts
Re: OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
#12I'm definitely more pro ad than the average HN user (I think they occasionally show me products I want to buy), but this seems bad and one step closer to "the LLM is biased by openai's financial interests."
In the example of a "sponsored agent" at the top, how many people are going to think "chat with us" is just a way to continue the conversation? How soon before openai removes the friction of clicking that entirely?
this is what openai said before: "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." https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
Do they need to rewrite that section? Because in the video there's an LLM chatbot inside the chatgpt app writing answers on behalf of "Heirloom grocery"
Re: OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
#13As usual with AI customer interaction, I have to ask who is liable for misleading advertising or unmet promises? The advertiser who isn't really in control of the chatbot, or OpenAI? (Law on this goes all the way back to Carbolic Smoke Ball )
It cannot be the AI vendor, according to what they say they are purely passive, think of them like a very large harness for their AI models.
It’s not the advertising companies of course, as you said they don’t control the system.
And it cannot be the models, because they don’t have personhood.
So, I guess it’s on nobody? Funny how those things happen to work, uh
/s
Re: OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
#14This is awfully unimaginative. I don’t see people using this. Where is the incentive to continue your conversation with the sponsored agent as opposed to, you know, the one you’re already talking to.
Re: OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
#15The fact that it requires a user action to initiate is better than the previous solution, but that's a pretty low bar to have
Re: OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
#16None of this would be necessary if they thought they were actually anywhere near AGI...hmm.
What if their AGI/ASI told them the road to Humanity betterment (because you know that was OpenAI initial mission, just in case we forgot) was through more efficient ads ? /s
Sounds like the plot of a Douglas Adam’s book
Re: OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
#17I'm definitely more pro ad than the average HN user (I think they occasionally show me products I want to buy), but this seems bad and one step closer to "the LLM is biased by openai's financial interests." In the example of a "sponsored agent" at the top, how many people are going to think "chat with us" is just a way to continue the conversation? How soon before openai removes the friction of clicking that entirely…
Disagree. I pitched this exact model to Google Search when we first started making LLMs. The idea was the bots were separate clearly from the core model so you’ll know when you were having a branded experience or not. And it s useful beyond ads. It can be for customer service or MCP interaction with the service directly.
Re: OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
#18How else are they to monetize text outputs? This was always the plan and it's going to get much worse (or better depending on which side of the fence you're on). Google did the same thing when it controlled web indexation: ads, sponsored results and SEO. All of these things will be coming to agents: you will be monetized or you will be paying not to be.
Re: OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
#19>Ads in ChatGPT help people find what they’re looking for or discover something they hadn’t considered.
Here I foolishly thought that that was the job of ChatGPT itself.
Re: OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
#20As usual with AI customer interaction, I have to ask who is liable for misleading advertising or unmet promises? The advertiser who isn't really in control of the chatbot, or OpenAI? (Law on this goes all the way back to Carbolic Smoke Ball )
It cannot be the AI vendor, according to what they say they are purely passive, think of them like a very large harness for their AI models. It’s not the advertising companies of course, as you said they don’t control the system. And it cannot be the models, because they don’t have personhood. So, I guess it’s on nobody? Funny how those things happen to work, uh /s
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine on this topic, available at all good bookstores near you.