Tell HN: OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs
I was on the £6.99/month program-- mainly because I didnt use it much. Last few days I've started seeing ads:
1. Ad for Financial Times 2. Add for Shein 3. Add for Amazon prime day
All 3 were on a chat where I was asking about tips on a mobile game.
Needless to say, I cancelled my plan. Im not paying money to see ads
You were on a plan that explicitly includes ads; if you don't want to see them (I don't either), then you can either upgrade to the no-ad tier or, as you did, cancel. Neither choice is wrong, but OpenAI definitely has been open about that lowest-tier paid plan having ads.
Or you go golden platinum extra special customer - to become even more addless for now.
I find it hilarious that they insert the adds that manual though. It would be so easy, to generate subconcious addds with an LLM. Like weave a slogan reminder into the conversation...
When ethics become hilarious.
Important is to have a illusion of choice, a play-thing of liberty. A painted on door. Buttons for settings that do nothing. Freedom is the illusion of choice.
So edgy.
The socialists usually do the "its not real libertarianism" when the cognitive dissonance of ideological failure hits - and the persecute the failing humans as traitors? Maybe do that too? Make "privacy settings violation" prosecutors office, demanding citizen spend at least n hours per week on the shenanigans?
I'm not sure it would be so easy to do it in a consistent, verifiable way. You can certainly prompt the LLM to work the ad into the conversation, but making sure it actually happens and is done in a way that the advertiser is going to be happy with is a lot harder.
Me, im not myself when hungry, but you do you ..
There's a black mirror episode like this. Not quite as bad having an AI doing it, though.
A woman needs this treatment after a brain injury. Iirc it clones her brain onto their servers. It's super experimental, it's a free surgery with a subscription service where you need to be within the supported area like cell towers.
If she stops paying for the service she will die. They promised to expand the support area to more countries and areas, but they end up raising prices as well as adding in advertising.
The advertising takes over her body at random contextual times and she basically does an ad read to the people in whatever situation.
It starts happening at the school where she works, she tells a kid about a certain product after he asks her about a problem. She's gonna lose her job because it creeps everyone out, so she has to pay more to get rid of the advertising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Oh man it might be time to watch the seventh season of this show
> It would be so easy, to generate subconcious addds with an LLM. Like weave a slogan reminder into the conversation...
Probably not without changing the underlying response and tanking the benchmark ratings. Like I ask it to generate code, it tries to add a slogan reminder, now the comments on my code have Tide's slogan in them and the variables are all named "bleach".
Probably less humorous than that, but the underlying point stands. People will be extremely upset about their prompts being tinkered with, and any perceived degradation in quality will be quickly attributed to them. The hidden nature of them will probably cause speculation that they do the same on the higher tier plans.
I think the ads would be more targeted. You ask it about code, and it suggests a paid library or an app that you can pay for.
It is quite interesting problem, because you could just respond with ok I want you to write whatever that library does. I don't want to pay for this.
If my business was a large CRUD app, like CRM I would be worried about smaller apps popping up on the market.
Now I'm wondering if all those extra Ds in ads are a subconscious ad.
If the gramar of adds is context free then the pumping lema applies.. and may allow to add additional d to the add
Never pay to avoid ads. Signals you've got money to waste, makes your attention even more valuable. You're paying to self-segment into the upper echelons of the market.
So?
So eventually some shareholder value maximizing CEO will come along and notice all the fat stacks of money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to all of those rich contrarians, which were kind enough to provide you with a database of themselves. A switch will be flipped and suddenly they will all get ads as well.
Always block the ads instead. Unconditionally, and without paying even one cent in extortion money. Your attention is yours. It's not theirs to sell to the highest bidder. You shouldn't have to pay in order to avoid being assaulted by ads. Blocking is legitimate self-defense.
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."
How exactly do you suggest blocking ads that appear inline in your LLM chats
Maybe use another LLM to filter them out. The world's first LLM-powered ad blocker.
Presumably you'd be paying for that, right?
What if the CEO of that one will come along and notice all the fat stacks of money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to all of those rich contrarians?
I pay for things that I value.
Me too. Just not to "avoid" ads. I actively block those instead, with extreme prejudice.
You will just get ads on higher tiers. Industry-wide practice.
Which males your attnetion valuable, and make them want to exploit it for profit
I see "This plan may include ads" under the $8 Go tier (accessed https://chatgpt.com/pricing/ from the US) going back to January. Is the behavior change recent?
Their entire ads rollout is recent.
interesting, no mention of that in Australia
Open AI attended the annual Cannes Ad Festival this year, alongside the usual Google, Meta etc
They have 900m users and 50m of them are paying.
Ads are inevitable. Surprised they put them on a paid plan user like you, but they are IPO'ing this year and need to show the best numbers possible.
Ads are inevitable.
Enshittification is inevitable.
Interesting how those two sentences are directly aligned. I hate ad culture.
"Ads are inevitable."
Not at all. They could even be prohibited by law, as evidenced by prohibitions of some ads being common in most jurisdictions and the Clean City Law of São Paulo.
One of the grand old men of modern advertising said that "man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard", and suggested that he would eventually turn to covert militant direct action against it. I suspect that he would have extended this to screen ads if he had lived long enough to experience them.
That's some interesting economy there.. 850m users are not paying, so we'll fund the product by displaying advertisements to those users that do not pay.
The advertisers spend money on those ads, but they know the audience doesn't want to pay.. but fortunately, their products might be free too, because they can also be funded by ads (served to the same audience).
This intelligent design provides infinite money and infinite growth!
They people who don’t pay for ChatGPT still spend money on toothpaste and movies and cars and cereal and a million other things. There’s a reason the advertising industry exists.
Are you sure that's because of online ads? (which I don't see due to ad blockers)
> There’s a reason the advertising industry exists.
I think we'd need to pause online ads to understand their true effect.. I know people buy things, but attributing these choices to the fact that an ad was displayed to the same user some days ago doesn't sound reliable to me.
> That's some interesting economy there.. 850m users are not paying, so we'll fund the product by displaying advertisements to those users that do not pay.
That is... not interesting. That is how the ad supported web worked for the past 20 years.
It's only for a few months, till AGI is finished...
Not really, what we should ask is how much of the revenue comes from:
- scams and fraud
- misattribution
- advertisers that don't actually care about the ROI
Didn't Anthropic create a series of commercials poking fun at OpenAI for putting ads in their chat? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTT55qFdyss
That was a pretty damn good ad. It manages to say a few things difficult to verbalize, and foists the absurdity of it right in the face. Nearly cathartic to watch, at least for a GPT h8r - (who, me?). The em dash after "perfect" noted in the comments... ;)
Yes their $8 (or equivalent) tier does have ads. It says so on https://chatgpt.com/pricing.
How relevant were the ads? Were they integrated into the chat or shown as a box next to the conversation? How did they manage to add the topics to a conversation about mobile games?
Zero relevance. I mean, Stardew Valley has nothing to do with Financial Times or buying clothes from Shein ;)
I was wondering how they made the leap between these topics :P
So basically it stood out like a sore thumb and was a random, disconnected sentence with a link inbetween the output you have actually asked for?
no it was quite random.
"Which crop is most profitable in summer?"
==> Ad for FT
It seems random. But maybe because they are still trying it out
Ads on setting paid plans of OpenAI says more about the state of the company itself rather then the ads they put. There is an interview where Sam Altman said OpenAI won't be putting Ads on any of their plans including the free plan unless as a last result. This basically means they will only put ads if they keep losing money from running their large data centers and AI isn't profitable. So ads on the Free plan generally mean we need money while ads on paid plans means are at the worst of the worst and we desperately need funding. Because when you think about it, OpenAI would never put ads even on a Free plan because it will only drive its users to its competitors like Gemini, Claude and so on. Either way this is just my take on the situation.
"Ads may appear for users on the Free and Go plans" and "we will not show ads in accounts where the user tells us or we predict that they are under 18"
Could be that based on your prompts it had just decided you were an adult, and started throwing ads at you.
What are these “adds” you are seeing? Are they “ads” as in the contraction slang form of “advertisements” akin to the British “adverts” or are you making a meta commentary on the “addition” of content to you Clanker experience?
I’m not genuinely confused tbh. I’m more nothing this as a case study of the “LLM user profile” anecdata I’m collecting. Some may call it lowbrow to harp on failing basic literacy yet being compelled to pay real money for a chatbox to help with mental efforts, but here we are.
I'm really curious if there are privacy implications to the ads since Google ads showed the complete search that you made to the advertiser. I'm curious how their ads console works
> Ad for Financial Times
Pay to see ads of products where you also pay to see ads :)
will there be a point where code generators start putting ads into their produced results, like “this pdf was made with the free version of pdfsoftware” watermarks unless you pay extra?
I think there will definitely be a point where code generators require a payment method to be registered before they can be used, and then generate code for paid products that it automatically subscribes you to.
WordPress and WooCommerce? Nah, here's how you set up a Squarespace Ecommerce site - if you hit publish, you'll be auto-subscribed to their $20/month plan.
They have been putting ads in the free and ‘go’ plans
I knew this would happen, the future of AI, is ads, lots of them. This isn’t the end, there will be more added on soon
Are the ads static or appear in a way that would make them recognized easily so that a uBlock Origin rules remove them?
Ublock Origin blocks them, at least on Firefox. I haven’t tested UBo Lite on Chromium browsers.
I use the app, so ad blocker doesnt work there. the app had uses, like its dictation was good
The most generic ad inventory. Personalized or content relevant ads is still fantasy I see
This has been known to be rolling out for a long time.
Netflix and Disney opened this box long ago when they introduced their “cheap with ads” plan and it’s their most popular subscription types.
The invisible hand of the market has spoken and people prefer advertisements over paying more.
Sad reality but unless we change the incentives this is going to happen with everything.
Ensh1ttification to pay the bills, classic
That's a way to reduce lost income from former clients.
It can be understood that the era of llm is merely an inheritor of the Internet. OpenAI is just another company that hasn't reached the same scale as Meta.
Mildly disappointed that it is not the dystopian adpocalypse we were warned against
Patience, Google wasn't enshittified in a day, after all!
Ah, wise words. There is still time indeed