OpenAI to begin testing ads on ChatGPT in the U.S.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/16/open-ai-chatgpt-ads-us.html

by koolba • 6 months ago

63 120 6 months ago

cnbc.com

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

Source: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-exp... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649577)

jryio• 6 months ago

Remember the internet before algorithmic ads and cross site tracking?

We will remember this moment of LLM usage for the years to come as we are irreparably spun by advertisers in our most intimate and private 1:1 conversations with these AIs

silveira• 6 months ago

Let the enshittification begin.

Then you move to the paid plan, then they move ads to the paid plan, then you move to the premium-extra plan, etc.

barbazoo3• 6 months ago

Not "ads" in the traditional sense but no one can tell me they won't use it to steer people toward whoever is paying their bills.

layer83• 6 months ago

What would be the metric by which they bill for it?

2OEH8eoCRo02• 6 months ago

Cancelling my subscription today

simianwords14• 6 months ago

There are no ads on subscriptions.. other than go.

colesantiago• 6 months ago

So you want ads then?

layer83• 6 months ago

Yeah, it’s a scandal that they’re depriving paying users of ads. ;)

midtake• 6 months ago

I just canceled Plus.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 6 months ago

Ditto!

pseudosavant3• 6 months ago

The writing has unfortunately been on the wall for this, especially for free users. They want you to make choices that are in their economic interests.

The biggest tell for me lately is that if you ask ChatGPT about products or even specific items on Amazon, it will only return links to companies that partner with OpenAI. None of the companies they currently partner (affiliate link basically) with are ones I prefer to buy from. It has made ChatGPT way less useful for this kind of research now. I certainly have reasons to distrust all their shopping links.

timpera• 6 months ago

To be fair, Amazon seems to be blocking ChatGPT. They're also in legal disputes with other AI companies that help their users to browse Amazon's website (https://www.perplexity.ai/fr/hub/blog/bullying-is-not-innova...).

simianwords14• 6 months ago

I'm getting links from amazon for shopping here.

oidar• 6 months ago

Forget about blocking ChatGPT, they block search from users. I can't count the number of times I'd had to go back to search engine to find a specific product on Amazon because they don't surface the product with the exact name I'm looking for... Last one was Unite 7Second Detangler. They only returned sponsored products, but go to Google (site:amazon.com Unite 7Second Detangler)and search - boom within the first five spots (and way cheaper than the products shown in Amazon's search). Don't trust Amazon search people! Search Amazon from another search engine.

m4ck_3• 6 months ago

Mission alignment: Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible.

Advertising and marketing kills humanity, these should be among the first industries that AI eliminates; kinda getting mixed messages here. You'd think the tech that supposedly is going to make money and all work irrelevant could figure out a way to make money without resorting to being yet another mechanism to deliver ads.

simianwords14• 6 months ago

Advertising and marketing kills humanity

No it doesn't. Please stope the hyperbole. Its literally just advertisements and people have the agency to choose to buy products.

miltonlost3• 6 months ago

"just" advertisements when ChatGPT is designed to be sycophantic and manipulative

alembic_fumes• 6 months ago

I invite you to ponder the question: would a worldwide ban of all advertising have a greater or smaller impact on environment-destroying activity than banning of all air travel?

I would argue for "greater", and from that it rather naturally follows that advertisement and marketing indeed kills humanity.

Aerbil3134• 6 months ago

Not really. Advertising results in extreme market inefficiencies through the game theory playing out (if you don't advertise as a company, you lose out to companies that do). It's the massive sink of the modern economy, there's nearly no sector unaffected by it. If advertising was banned (not that it's very easy) vast majority of issues associated with capitalism wouldn't even exist and everybody would be wealthier.

The similarity between advertising and cancer are striking, see the post Advertising is a cancer on society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142

This is all putting aside the fact that %99.9 of all advertising works by exploiting the familiarity circuit in the human brain. The effects of advertising are, by definition, not voluntary. See Ads just work, no matter what you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399633

If the purpose of %99.9 of advertising was not exploiting the familiarity circuit and was instead to make you aware of a product you didn't know about before, there wouldn't be a single ad of Coca-Cola, since everybody on the planet knows about it already.

Also, my mom literally buys whatever she sees playing on YouTube ads that week. I know because I see those ads too. You'd be surprised how many people are going through life with undiagnosed or untreated ADHD and how many further lack cognitive agency.

m4ck_3• 6 months ago

To be clear, I'm not saying that advertising under whatever slop chatgpt outputs is killing humanity, I'm more thinking of the industry as a whole. They use lies and deception to influence behavior and push products; even if they're fully aware that the claims they're making are blatant lies and the products are harmful. If that industry disappeared humanity would be better off for it.

and to be fair the industry doesn't need to be banned, just heavily regulated, fully transparent, and there should be exponential consequences for their lies (such as, claiming cigarettes are healthy while knowing they're addictive and cause cancer; anyone involved in decisions like that should be in Angola growing tobacco for 13 cents an hour.)

robotpepi11• 6 months ago

People have the agency to not consume drugs. The point is, marketing is completely absurd, it's an immense inefficiency of the system.

imiric3• 6 months ago

Spoken like a true advertiser.

The reality is that psychologically manipulating people into buying things by forcing yourself as a middleman into every business transaction and industry on the planet is not just morally despicable, but opportunistic, exploitative, and many other negative descriptors I can't quite put into words.

But this isn't even the truly insidious and harmful part. That is reserved for the fact that the same systems used to get people to consume, are also used to manipulate them into thinking and acting in ways that someone, somewhere, could potentially benefit from. So anyone with a negligible amount of resources and effort has the ability to influence individuals, groups of people, societies, and entire countries, to buy into their agenda by pushing their propaganda. After all, modern advertising uses the same propaganda tactics pioneered by the likes of E. Bernays a century ago.

It should be clear to any sane adult that this psychological manipulation is directly responsible for the corruption of democratic processes and sociopolitical instability we've seen around the world for the past decade+.

And then, if all this wasn't enough, these advertising leeches are doing this by violating digital rights, abusing our privacy, corrupting every entertainment experience, and utilizing every nasty trick they can legally get away with to steal our data, and get rich from it via dark data broker markets in perpetuity.

So, please, spare me the bullshit excuse that this is "just" advertising, and that it's a public good that helps poor small businesses reach customers. Catalogs and contextual advertising have existed for decades, but that wasn't enough for these greedy bastards. Humanity is objectively far worse off because of this, and the adtech industry has played a huge role in making it happen. Everyone who has worked on this tech should be ashamed of themselves, even though I'm sure they don't think twice about it, and enjoy the sight of their bank account statements.

piva002• 6 months ago

There's agency but it's being manipulated by psychological tricks since the advent of the whole PR industry. That's how it was born, Edward Bernays discovered he could use techniques borrowed from his uncle Sigmund Freud to manipulate people to buy stuff.

Given this trickery I wouldn't say that people have absolute complete agency, they are being exploited, even more the ones that are more affected by trick A or B. I do agree it should be more nuanced than "it's killing humanity" but at the same time I believe you should meet more in the middle that there are manipulative tactics used by the whole PR industry that are exploitative, and do affect people's agency.

xyzzy123• 6 months ago

It does feel like ensh*ttification. I can't imagine how many school essays and law filings and papers these ads are going to end up embedded in.

But the most charitable view is that even AGI needs cost recovery. Ads are the way you do this for people who aren't willing or able to pay with money.

For better or worse, OpenAI exists in the context of a capitalist system. It has to be competitive in that arena to attract and retain investment, staff, etc. Revenue always ends up being part of the "mission".

boelboel2• 6 months ago

The biggest problem with ads is that even if I were willing to pay any amount of money I would still get many of the problems brought by this 'ad run' world. There's enough things where you can't even avoid ads.

henryfjordan2• 6 months ago

Advertisement serves an important purpose. If you were a farmer with a mule and the tractor salesman came by for the first time, that would be life-changing for you. You wouldn't say that salesman was evil for advertising his tractor.

m4ck_3• 6 months ago

Fair enough, there is some utility to it. But we're quite along way from traveling salesmen advertising tractors. Maybe it doesn't need to be eliminated, just heavily regulated.

What if the salesman said knowingly lied about his tractors? or poisoned the farmer's mules to influence him towards buying one? That'd be on the scale of evil, right?

GenerWork• 6 months ago

If they can’t advertise, then how should they make a profit/hit break even?

imiric3• 6 months ago

kinda getting mixed messages here

Did you really expect a corporation to be transparent and consistent with their messaging? It should be obvious by now that the word "open" in their name is pure marketing.

I'm surprised it took them this long to jump on the advertising money train. I wouldn't be surprised if they were already monetizing this in the background, and only decided to make it public now.

aeon_ai• 6 months ago

| Long-term value: We do not optimize for time spent in ChatGPT. We prioritize user trust and user experience over revenue.

The unspoken part -- This holds true so long as revenue is at least equal to costs, and speaks nothing about whether user trust and user experience is optimized over profit.

invokestatic• 6 months ago

I’ve been paying for Google Workspace for my custom domain for years basically just so I can use Gmail. For just $7 more dollars a month, I upgraded my plan to access Gemini Pro, which has guaranteed enterprise-grade privacy controls. I think this is currently the best value platform for anyone who values their privacy for LLMs. If Apple and the DoD trust Google’s internal controls, I do too.

barbazoo3• 6 months ago

This too sounds like an ad.

josefritzishere• 6 months ago

The Enshittification curve is analagous to Moore's law.

netdur• 6 months ago

they have been doomed for a while, it is just a matter of time, but honestly i like them better than the claude provider, if they can make openai profitable, that would be good for all of us, we don't want a world where gemini is the only winner or the chinese take over

still-learning• 6 months ago

Is there any hope that they wont let any of the ads logic into the rl / pre-training? I'd like for my paid ChatGPT model to offer an unbiased source of truth on what the best products are.

simianwords14• 6 months ago

I wonder if they will buff the free tier with higher rate limits because the ads will be able to sustain them

rvz• 6 months ago

Realistically nothing is going to happen. In fact this propels OpenAI to $1TN in valuation.

Threads introduced ads and almost no-one cared. This will be the exact same result.

If you don't want the ads, then pay $8 for ChatGPT Go.

Analemma_• 6 months ago

Yeah, the predictions of doom are so wildly misplaced. There's even a sibling comment on this thread saying, "When Google introduced ads [note: in 2000], it made the product objectively worse." Sure, and did Google die as a result? Or did it subsequently go from a startup with modest revenue in a company with a multi-trillion dollar market cap and $100 billion in quarterly revenue?

101008• 6 months ago

ChatGPT Go is going to include ads as well.

"In the coming weeks, 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."

pseudosavant3• 6 months ago

When ads were introduced into Google, it objectively made the search product worse. You no longer saw what they thought would be the most relevant result. You literally saw Google's most profitable (it is an auction) result.

If we apply that kind of thinking to chat LLMs, it means instead of getting the most relevant tokens, you'll be shown the most profitable tokens. Maybe the most relevant tokens will be below the fold (like unpaid search results) now.

pseudosavant3• 6 months ago

Just wait for the image generators that have paid product placement like TV and movies do now. You ask for an edit of a photo and it changes an ad in the background to a different company. This idea seems awful, and also so obvious that it is going to happen.

satvikpendem16• 6 months ago

Going to? It happened 20 years ago already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Force_is_with_Cristal_Beer

amitav14• 6 months ago

"it objectively made the search product worse"

I would disagree, because without the advertising there probably would be no Google.

vinyl7• 6 months ago

Arguably Google could go the way of AOL and no one would notice

dylanlacom• 6 months ago

Ironic to show ads only to your users with the least spending power. Me thinks this will not last. Once the ads get “good enough” they will be everywhere.

Aerbil3134• 6 months ago

This marks the day advertising entered a new era and got extremely efficient.

Expect all other LLM vendors to follow soon. If they don't, they will lose.

Imnimo2• 6 months ago

ChatGPT’s responses will not be influenced by ads

I don't see why I should believe this.

simianwords14• 6 months ago

Do you believe google search results are influenced by ads?

Imnimo2• 6 months ago

Yeah, both directly and indirectly. Over time, "sponsored links" became more and more visually indistinguishable form organic results, and advertising incentives drove changes to the search algorithm.

amarcheschi• 6 months ago

Considering that I have reported a Google ad that I deem political and Google does not, that I'm going to appeal because as a eu citizen I can do so, that they'll most likely refuse the appeal and I'm ready to bring this to the relevant Italian authority, yes

A few days ago I read a newspaper article about Israel's government using ads to spread its propaganda. In eu, you have to follow some rules if you want to do so. These rules are not followed. Combined with the fact that ads might not be distinguished easily by average users, I feel that Google search results can be influenced by ads

unethical_ban• 6 months ago

Oh, this is so benign and appropriate. This will never escalate, and OpenAI is governed by strict privacy laws and audited by the public so we can trust they won't ever change their policy or have bias injected into their models.

klipklop• 6 months ago

It took many years and billions in profit before Google enshitified. OpenAI? Almost at birth.

FeteCommuniste• 6 months ago

Today's userbase is already thoroughly inured to enshittified tech, so why waste time carefully inching your way to the bottom of the shitpit rather than diving straight down? There's money to be made, baby.

Palmik• 6 months ago

What are you talking about? Google came out in 1998 and introduced ads in search results in 2000

satvikpendem16• 6 months ago

Curious how the economics are going to go. ChatGPT has close to a billion MAU and they're losing money even with subscriptions. Meanwhile Google with Gemini is catching up (although I've seen reports that Gemini is also testing ads in their chats, especially without disclosing it's an ad, by linking to Google Shopping [0]). The Google example might show how it might appear:

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Incidentally, I just saw on Show HN an AI SEO tool [1], wonder if OpenAI will also include similar features in their ad platform. Maybe we'll just type in our questions and it'll spit out stats and graphs itself, now that is more likely.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46533480

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642490

zkitty• 6 months ago

For those who blocked by pay wall: Here is their original announcement tweet. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2012223373489614951?s=20

PyWoody• 6 months ago

https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2012223373489614951

For those who are blocked by Twitter.

lasgawe• 6 months ago

One way or another, ChatGPT-like platforms provide ads.

OpenAI to begin testing ads on ChatGPT in the U.S.

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