Ads are coming to ChatGPT. OpenAI is attempting to head off some of the inherent misalignment with ads and users by outlining some ad principles:

Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. […] We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers. […] We do not optimize for time spent in ChatGPT.

The problem is once you’re making money with ads, it’s hard not to optimize for more ads. I just hope ads will remain a small part of their business compared to Plus and Pro subscriptions.

@manton this is like saying you’re only going to experiment just a little with meth.

@manton Yeah… these are soft disclaimers, not promises, and will slowly disappear over time. They have shareholders to please.

To be fair, we all knew this was coming 🤷‍♂️ it was only a matter of time.

@manton seems like anthropic has found the better path. They’ve built a solid user base by being focused and picking a few things to be really good at. OpenAI is over leveraged which is leading them to turn their users into a product. I’ll be surprised if anthropic follows their lead.

@manton

Hope is not a strategy.

@Matty8r I don’t expect Anthropic to do ads either. They’ve carved out a nice business for paid users / enterprise folks. ChatGPT is many times larger, though.

@manton Sounds a lot like Google’s “Don’t be evil.” That turned out well. 🙄

@Matty8r I find myself using a combination of Claude and Dia, mostly Claude. It’s just more pleasant that ChatGPT and seems more code focused. I may drop my OpenAI account in the next few months.

@manton Ads are really the least of my problems with OpenAI. The wait is for people getting their voting advice from an LLM. This will happen, you know it will.

@renevanbelzen oh, I guarantee you that people are already taking their voting advice from ChatGPT. 😔