Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

if you think about it, the current advertising paradigm infers things about you, from cookies and trackers, from data brokers etc (to show you “relevant” ads.

and things you “like” or “follow” or comment on , or maybe even just making guesses at your race, job, income, sexual orientation, politics etc based on who youre “friends” with.

all of thats on the decline: social media engagement on legacy platforms is down, people are blocking cookies and or javascript. california is making an opt out tool for data brokers (and its going live in a month or two)

people have hours long conversations with chatgpt about things like what theyre working on. so it might know your job, talents, skills. things planning (aspirations) , things you asked it how to cook, or whats wrong with them medically. or maybe theyve dished to it about other personal stuff they thought was 100% in confidence up until now.

then now that its “private”, advertisers cant get backlash for showing ads next to controversial content, or people who are “supposed to be cancelled”. it removes a pressure point for accidentally (or deliberately) displaying their content somewhere its inappropriate or problematic for the brand— by hiding the interaction (and ads) in a “private” chat—

just for starters.

were at a point where publishers are nagging about our popup blockers and having hissy fits or refusing to load the page until their ads are whitelisted. so you know enough people are doing it to impact peoples business models now.

ill personly disable JS altogether for sites that do that but a lot of people just wont return.

its a dying media the way it exists.

so now all these ad providers (meta, google, twitter) are in on AI . and here comes openAI for all three of their lunches.

this just opened my eyes to what is at stake here and why its all being shoved down everyones throats. sure i use them, but i also have local models installed id drop them in an instant for if my chats were used to show me ads.

then just wait for ANY of these two entities to merge and overwhelm your social media feed with the next twenty years of ads full of junk the “AI” learned about you.

> All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due

That’s the issue OpenAI has: Gemini is “free” with google search and other google services. If Apple get their act together they can provide a “privacy respecting” AI free with every iPhone.

I’ve recently switched from OpenAI as my daily ‘helper’ chatbot to Gemini (I’ve done it with Claude in the past and still use that for coding) and don’t miss ChatGPT. Sure each has quirks and one will release a new version and it becomes the best LLM briefly but to the majority of public and businesses they are interchangeable and the winner is the one that can deliver the functionality for free (because it’s paid for by another service) or into an existing product.

going off my example - chatgpt knows everything about me including desires, goals and issues im struggling with.

combine this with the fact that i have disposable income.

i can't fathom how much advertisers are willing to pay to put themselves in front of my eyes vs a google search for "dining table"

It's really frustrating to see every innovation eventually crammed into advertisements. The brightest minds spend most of their energy figuring out effective ways of serving ads.

That would be illegal.

I understand that there are a lot of strong opinions and open questions about OpenAI behavior – the amount of vigilantism is quite staggering – but if what they do is found to be clearly illegal by courts around the world, they will have to pay very hefty fines. Disguising ads is one such move. That's just not a winning business.