Tell HN: OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48673194

by shantnutiwari • 27 days ago

115 64 27 days ago

news.ycombinator.com

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

bflesch2• 27 days ago

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?

shantnutiwari3• 27 days ago

Zero relevance. I mean, Stardew Valley has nothing to do with Financial Times or buying clothes from Shein ;)

bflesch2• 27 days ago

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?

SOTGO• 27 days ago

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?

paxys3• 27 days ago

Their entire ads rollout is recent.

senectus1• 27 days ago

interesting, no mention of that in Australia

blourvim2• 27 days ago

Mildly disappointed that it is not the dystopian adpocalypse we were warned against

thrance• 27 days ago

Patience, Google wasn't enshittified in a day, after all!

blourvim2• 27 days ago

Ah, wise words. There is still time indeed

khurs2• 27 days ago

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.

hightrix• 27 days ago

Ads are inevitable.

Enshittification is inevitable.

Interesting how those two sentences are directly aligned. I hate ad culture.

cess11• 27 days ago

"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.

zb34• 27 days ago

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!

paxys3• 27 days ago

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.

jstummbillig2• 27 days ago

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.

stranded22• 27 days ago

They have been putting ads in the free and ‘go’ plans

paxys3• 27 days ago

Yes their $8 (or equivalent) tier does have ads. It says so on https://chatgpt.com/pricing.

elashri• 27 days ago

Are the ads static or appear in a way that would make them recognized easily so that a uBlock Origin rules remove them?

throwatdem123112• 27 days ago

Ublock Origin blocks them, at least on Firefox. I haven’t tested UBo Lite on Chromium browsers.

shantnutiwari3• 27 days ago

I use the app, so ad blocker doesnt work there. the app had uses, like its dictation was good

pulvinar• 27 days ago

"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.

gravel7623• 27 days ago

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

eth0up• 27 days ago

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... ;)

mysterydip• 27 days ago

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?

rchaud• 27 days ago

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.

christkv• 27 days ago

The most generic ad inventory. Personalized or content relevant ads is still fantasy I see

kylemaxwell• 27 days ago

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.

21asdffdsa125• 27 days ago

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...

jstummbillig2• 27 days ago

When ethics become hilarious.

aesthesia• 27 days ago

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.

Cider9986• 27 days ago

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)

everforward• 27 days ago

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.

drcongo• 27 days ago

Now I'm wondering if all those extra Ds in ads are a subconscious ad.

matheusmoreira4• 27 days ago

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.

estearum• 27 days ago

So?

ElijahLynn• 27 days ago

I pay for things that I value.

throwatdem123112• 27 days ago

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.

zb34• 27 days ago

Ad for Financial Times

Pay to see ads of products where you also pay to see ads :)

daft_pink• 27 days ago

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

okzgn• 27 days ago

That's a way to reduce lost income from former clients.

6stringmerc• 27 days ago

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.

b3ing• 27 days ago

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

frankzero• 27 days ago

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.

grigio• 27 days ago

Ensh1ttification to pay the bills, classic

jamesli233• 27 days ago

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.

Tell HN: OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs

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