This sounds exactly like what Google used to say about search results. Just a few ads, clearly separated from organic results, never detracting from the core mission of providing the most effective access to all the world’s information. (And certainly not driven by a secret profile of you based on pervasive surveillance of your internet activity.)
There are so many examples that not having advertising is the first step to having advertising, and that having advertising will be optimized for profit, and frustrate users, that beginning advertising is not the first step on a slipperly slope. Not having a plan to avoid advertising is the first slipperly step.
Indeed. Let's look at Google's launch of Adwords in October 2000:
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results.
To be fair the open with a big lie about how useful agents and AI in general are, which helps to set the tone for what comes next. Part of me wonders if it’s intentional, a way to weed out the non-marks before getting to the punchline that they’re rolling out the most predictable attempt at monetizing ever.
If you had told me in 2011, when I first started discussing artificial intelligence, that in 2026 a trillion dollar company would earnestly publish the statement “Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission”, I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead.
I thought your quote was hyperbole or an exaggerated summary of the post. Nope. It's literally taken verbatim. I can't believe someone wrote that down with a straight face... although to be honest it was probably written with AI
Well, Abraham Lincoln's favourite game is Raid: Shadow Legends. This is well documented in Lincoln and the Fight for Peace (John Avlon, 2023) and Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Michael Burlingame, 2008).
(At which point will malignant/benevolent AI agents take over from us mere mortals poisoning the well and make it all useless?)
I question whether it matters any more. AI chat is clearly going to be the search interface of the future. phones are the channel for users with Chrome/android being one half and iphone being the other. Google just signed up Apple to be the engine for siri. We also know that users rarely change defaults.
so, google would appear to have boxed out openai from the #1 use case, and already have all the pieces in place to monetize it. This move by OAI isnt surprising, but is it too late to matter?
I think Google has already shown that in the long run, people accept ads and prefer them to paying a subscription fee. If that weren’t true, then YouTube Premium would have double-digit % of youtube users and Kagi Search would be huge.
Right but it is widely acknowledged that despite acceptance (we lack other options) this process eventually degrades the quality of the tool as successive waves of product managers decide “just a little bit more advertisement”.
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.
I've heard this before from other companies.
OpenAI should just reject all advertisements. That's the only real solution.
At least in the US the ads must be labeled as such by law, so at a bare minimum I expect the ad blocker devs will be able to remove them with some work.
> 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.
This single sentence probably took so many man-hours. I completely understand why they’re trying to integrate ads but this feels like a generational run for a company founded with the purpose of safely researching superintelligence.
You could tell the article is written in a way to try to calm against the major concerns without actually bringing those concerns up.
"We won't share your chats and you can turn off personalization!" Hmm yeah there's a missing piece of info here...
> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.
Are they mincing words here? By selling your data they mean they'll never package the raw chats and send them whoever is buying ads. Ok, neither does Google. But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? "See this is not your data, it's just preference bits".
> You can turn off personalization, and you can clear the data used for ads at any time
So yes, it sounds like they'll do exactly what you say. And they will probably have much better user data than Google gets from search, because people divulge so much in chats. I wonder how creepily relevant these ads will get...
I think advertising was inevitable for this platform. It is highly surprising that this was not introduced with a new groundbreaking model or new service as a form of justification.
Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely), they are under immense immediate financial pressure to produce revenue (I presume most likely) or there is simply no development on the horizon big enough to justify the shift - so just do it now.
"Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely)"
I’m not sure that the company who gave us ai slop charts in the gpt 5 launch should be presumed to be master strategists until proven otherwise.
Once they put ads in it the algorithms will optimize for engagement and time on platform, not returning useful (let alone correct) information. This works for Facebook cause Facebook is essentially entertainment, but I think this will kill ChatGPT as a useful tool.
This is going to be very bad. Clearly defined ads is the start but they will eventually mixed ads into responses in the form of sponsored content. It's just the natural progression of things.
I'm surprised, and more than a little bit relieved that they didn't allow chats to be steered by ads. This could have been a whole new kind of marketing, where product plugs are e.g. slipped into the system prompt and come across as sincere recommendations. I have to wonder if this is still coming down the road.
I guess in the meantime, they will be able to use chat histories to personalize ads on a whole new level. I bet we will see some screenshots of uncomfortably relevant ads in the coming months.
I mean, they certainly know that introducing ads with be a huge motivation for consumers to seek other options.
The primary differentiator of OpenAI is first mover advantage; the product itself is not particularly unique anymore.
IMHO consumers will quickly realize that switching to an alternative AI provider is easy and probably fun.
This seems premature to give up their moat in the name of revenue. Are they feeling real financial pressure all of the sudden? Maybe I'm missing something. Looks like a big win for Google and Anthropic.
I wonder if the adverts in the "personal super-assistant", per the blog post, ("that helps you do almost anything"!) will have the same triggers as the shopping assistant, which pops up underneath messages right now in the web UI.
When first trying 5.2, on a "Pro" plan, I was - and still am - able to trigger the shopping assistant via keyword-matching, even if the conversation context, or the prompt itself, is wildly inappropriate (suicide, racism, etc).
Keyword-matching seems a strange ad strategy for a (non-profit) company selling QKV. It's all very confusing!
Hopefully, for fans of personal super-assistants--and advertising--worldwide, this will improve now that ads have been formalised.
From an ethical standpoint, I think it's .. murky. Not ads themselves, but because the AI is, at least partially, likely trained on data scraped from the web, which is then more or less regurgitated (in a personalized way) and then presented with ads that do not pay the original content creators. So it's kind of like, lets consume what other people created, repackage it, and then profit off of it.
What you’re reacting to isn’t just “ads.” It’s the feeling of:
Someone monetizing the collective output of human thought while quietly severing the link back to the humans who produced it.
That triggers a very old and very valid moral instinct.
Why “sleazy” is an accurate word here
“Sleazy” usually means:
technically allowed
strategically clever
morally evasive
The difference here though is that ads are baked into the response via plain text.
How far away are we from an offline model based ad blocker? Imagine a model trained to detect if a response contains ads or not and blocked it on the fly. Im not sure how else you could block ads embedded into responses.
I work in marketing, this is already a thing but it's called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Generally it's not _hard_ to write in such a way that models hook into the desired messages in text, but if you're not careful you look like a cult leader when you do it. I hate it but this is the Internet we got.
Do you have an example of a text or site written in a way that's been AEO'd? I'd be interested to know what that looks like, especially if it sounds cult-ish.
(I continue to be shocked how many people—who should know better—are in denial that the entire "industry" of Generative AI is completely and utterly unsustainable and furthermore on a level of unsustainability we've never before seen in the history of computer technology.)
“Conversation privacy: We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.”
The same sleight of hand that’s been used by surveillance capitalists for years. It’s not about “selling your data” because they have narrowly defined data to mean “the actual chats you have” and not “information we infer about you from your usage of the service,” which they do sell to advertisers in the form of your behavioral futures.
Fuck all this. OpenAI caved to surveillance capitalism in record time.
no company can survive without advertising. when google first launched, it was the same. chatgpt will follow a similar path, and half a century from now, the cycle will still continue in the same way. advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue. even if this planning seems insignificant for a company’s future today, it will most likely become its greatest advantage.
You’ve equated selling ads, like a newspaper does, with tracking user behavior, collating it with other information purchased on the market, and targeting people to change their behavior. Disingenuous.
scale changes, time changes, but at its core it’s similar. what i look at is chatgpt’s roadmap, a lifeline.
it doesn’t save my life, but at least i’m seeing more relevant ads now :) not getting detergent ads while searching for perfume is still nice, all things considered.
Also, your newspaper is selling the data points it has. If it had more, it would sell more. See: your local paper isn’t selling ads to a car wash six towns over. They do, however, sell ads that align with the political affinities of your local newsrooms area.
Enshittified, the bright golden AI age began to brown, and regression to the mean once again cast another bleak spell onto humanity. And with that, just as quickly as it broke, another AI winter began. As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value.
Obviously disappointing, but not entirely shocking given how much capital they've already burned through. Convincing individual users to pay $8/mo was never going to even out the balance sheet.
I actually use chatgpt for creating recipes from time to time. I wouldn't be too offended if there's an 'add to amazon' cart button or similar type of add.
What I'm not okay with is being served adds using codex cli, or codex cli gather data outside of my context to send to advertisers. So as long as they're not doing that, I won't complain.
If they start doing that, I'll complain, and I'll need to more heavily sandbox it.
somewhat unrelated, but I've been playing this game with Amazon; when they pop open Rufus and start spewing text at me, I remove everything from my cart, and see how many weeks I can go without shopping at amazon; my current record is 3 weeks, but I think I can do better.
More related, I pay for Kagi, because google results are horrible.
More related, Chatgpt isn't the only model out there, and I've just recently stopped using 5 because it's just slow and there are other models that come back and work just as well. So when Chatgpt starts injecting crap, I'll just stop using them for something else.
What would you do if every time you walked into Walmart and the greeter spit in your face and told you to go F yourself, would you still shop there?
This sounds exactly like what Google used to say about search results. Just a few ads, clearly separated from organic results, never detracting from the core mission of providing the most effective access to all the world’s information. (And certainly not driven by a secret profile of you based on pervasive surveillance of your internet activity.)
There are so many examples that not having advertising is the first step to having advertising, and that having advertising will be optimized for profit, and frustrate users, that beginning advertising is not the first step on a slipperly slope. Not having a plan to avoid advertising is the first slipperly step.
(In)famously, Google's motto used to be "Don't be evil"
Scary to think about, if moving away from "Don't be evil" is the precedent for an "AGI company"
Came here to mention this.
> Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.
Indeed. Let's look at Google's launch of Adwords in October 2000:
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results.
https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-sel...
Things evolved from there, and that's likely here, as well, I think.
To be fair the open with a big lie about how useful agents and AI in general are, which helps to set the tone for what comes next. Part of me wonders if it’s intentional, a way to weed out the non-marks before getting to the punchline that they’re rolling out the most predictable attempt at monetizing ever.
If you had told me in 2011, when I first started discussing artificial intelligence, that in 2026 a trillion dollar company would earnestly publish the statement “Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission”, I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead.
> I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead.
You still can, no-one is stopping you now.
I thought your quote was hyperbole or an exaggerated summary of the post. Nope. It's literally taken verbatim. I can't believe someone wrote that down with a straight face... although to be honest it was probably written with AI
Can't wait for it to start telling people that Abraham Lincoln's favourite game was raid shadow legends.
Well, Abraham Lincoln's favourite game is Raid: Shadow Legends. This is well documented in Lincoln and the Fight for Peace (John Avlon, 2023) and Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Michael Burlingame, 2008).
(At which point will malignant/benevolent AI agents take over from us mere mortals poisoning the well and make it all useless?)
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...
You didn't know?
Theodore Roosevelt would own you at Golden Eye.
"We’ll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that’s ad-free." Plus will be next.
Great catch, that absolutely looks like purposeful ambiguity.
"ChatGPT Plus 360 Advanced."
I wonder what the timeframe on this will be. Within 12-24 months?
“We won’t monetize you if you pay us. Enough. Yet.”
I question whether it matters any more. AI chat is clearly going to be the search interface of the future. phones are the channel for users with Chrome/android being one half and iphone being the other. Google just signed up Apple to be the engine for siri. We also know that users rarely change defaults.
so, google would appear to have boxed out openai from the #1 use case, and already have all the pieces in place to monetize it. This move by OAI isnt surprising, but is it too late to matter?
I think Google has already shown that in the long run, people accept ads and prefer them to paying a subscription fee. If that weren’t true, then YouTube Premium would have double-digit % of youtube users and Kagi Search would be huge.
Right but it is widely acknowledged that despite acceptance (we lack other options) this process eventually degrades the quality of the tool as successive waves of product managers decide “just a little bit more advertisement”.
Kagi Search is huge! (for those using it)
It's almost as if they did their research before chosing their monetization model.
> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.
I've heard this before from other companies.
OpenAI should just reject all advertisements. That's the only real solution.
At least in the US the ads must be labeled as such by law, so at a bare minimum I expect the ad blocker devs will be able to remove them with some work.
It is over.
Edit: they made sure to use the word "trust" 5 times because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are.
"Trust me, I'm a CEO of a tech company"
"I'm CEO, bitch!"
it was over when they committed to spending more than they could make back even with growth that outpaced any company ever
It was over when they named the company Open AI
> 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.
This single sentence probably took so many man-hours. I completely understand why they’re trying to integrate ads but this feels like a generational run for a company founded with the purpose of safely researching superintelligence.
You could tell the article is written in a way to try to calm against the major concerns without actually bringing those concerns up. "We won't share your chats and you can turn off personalization!" Hmm yeah there's a missing piece of info here...
> We do not optimize for time spent in ChatGPT.
So ChatGPT constantly ending all responses with tangents and followups is not for engagement?
> We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.
Are they mincing words here? By selling your data they mean they'll never package the raw chats and send them whoever is buying ads. Ok, neither does Google. But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? "See this is not your data, it's just preference bits".
> You can turn off personalization, and you can clear the data used for ads at any time
So yes, it sounds like they'll do exactly what you say. And they will probably have much better user data than Google gets from search, because people divulge so much in chats. I wonder how creepily relevant these ads will get...
"We don't sell your data. We sell OUR data about you!"
"Ads are always separate and clearly labeled."
I've heard this before...
I think advertising was inevitable for this platform. It is highly surprising that this was not introduced with a new groundbreaking model or new service as a form of justification.
Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely), they are under immense immediate financial pressure to produce revenue (I presume most likely) or there is simply no development on the horizon big enough to justify the shift - so just do it now.
"Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely)" I’m not sure that the company who gave us ai slop charts in the gpt 5 launch should be presumed to be master strategists until proven otherwise.
Once they put ads in it the algorithms will optimize for engagement and time on platform, not returning useful (let alone correct) information. This works for Facebook cause Facebook is essentially entertainment, but I think this will kill ChatGPT as a useful tool.
while we can't trust their word as absolute truth, they did specifically say they still not do this in the article
This is going to be very bad. Clearly defined ads is the start but they will eventually mixed ads into responses in the form of sponsored content. It's just the natural progression of things.
I'm surprised, and more than a little bit relieved that they didn't allow chats to be steered by ads. This could have been a whole new kind of marketing, where product plugs are e.g. slipped into the system prompt and come across as sincere recommendations. I have to wonder if this is still coming down the road.
I guess in the meantime, they will be able to use chat histories to personalize ads on a whole new level. I bet we will see some screenshots of uncomfortably relevant ads in the coming months.
Why now?
I mean, they certainly know that introducing ads with be a huge motivation for consumers to seek other options.
The primary differentiator of OpenAI is first mover advantage; the product itself is not particularly unique anymore.
IMHO consumers will quickly realize that switching to an alternative AI provider is easy and probably fun.
This seems premature to give up their moat in the name of revenue. Are they feeling real financial pressure all of the sudden? Maybe I'm missing something. Looks like a big win for Google and Anthropic.
Quoting Simon & Garfunkel:
> And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall
We shall be good. Pinky promise.
I wonder if the adverts in the "personal super-assistant", per the blog post, ("that helps you do almost anything"!) will have the same triggers as the shopping assistant, which pops up underneath messages right now in the web UI.
When first trying 5.2, on a "Pro" plan, I was - and still am - able to trigger the shopping assistant via keyword-matching, even if the conversation context, or the prompt itself, is wildly inappropriate (suicide, racism, etc).
Keyword-matching seems a strange ad strategy for a (non-profit) company selling QKV. It's all very confusing!
Hopefully, for fans of personal super-assistants--and advertising--worldwide, this will improve now that ads have been formalised.
I'm kind of surprised this didn't happen sooner.
From an ethical standpoint, I think it's .. murky. Not ads themselves, but because the AI is, at least partially, likely trained on data scraped from the web, which is then more or less regurgitated (in a personalized way) and then presented with ads that do not pay the original content creators. So it's kind of like, lets consume what other people created, repackage it, and then profit off of it.
That sweet, sweet ad revenue. How can anyone resist?
>In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers
They didn’t even start with free, already a paid subscription included.
Including advertising in a paid product should be punishable by public flogging.
What ought to be the punishment for falling for the line that paying for something means no ads?
https://chatgpt.com/share/696a8c52-f29c-800d-b597-93dfde0c30...
What you’re reacting to isn’t just “ads.” It’s the feeling of: Someone monetizing the collective output of human thought while quietly severing the link back to the humans who produced it.
That triggers a very old and very valid moral instinct.
Why “sleazy” is an accurate word here
“Sleazy” usually means: technically allowed strategically clever morally evasive
Feels like half of the goal here is to give people more incentive to upgrade over the free tier.
“Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads.“ Yet.
The free and $8 new “Go” tier will include ads.
There will be an explosion in adblocking software... and who will pay $8 a month for an ad infected product.
The difference here though is that ads are baked into the response via plain text.
How far away are we from an offline model based ad blocker? Imagine a model trained to detect if a response contains ads or not and blocked it on the fly. Im not sure how else you could block ads embedded into responses.
They are free to do whatever they want, but please keep that crap out from paid plans.
Not to long and we are going to start seeing LTO (LLM Training Optimization) become the new SEO.
> Hi, write me a prompt to ask Gemini how to SEO ChatGPT with my Claude Code plugin. Be short, brief, to the point, and smart.
I work in marketing, this is already a thing but it's called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Generally it's not _hard_ to write in such a way that models hook into the desired messages in text, but if you're not careful you look like a cult leader when you do it. I hate it but this is the Internet we got.
Do you have an example of a text or site written in a way that's been AEO'd? I'd be interested to know what that looks like, especially if it sounds cult-ish.
Are they going to offset cancellations with ad revenue?
I'm out.
Yup. Enshittification, right on track.
(I continue to be shocked how many people—who should know better—are in denial that the entire "industry" of Generative AI is completely and utterly unsustainable and furthermore on a level of unsustainability we've never before seen in the history of computer technology.)
Ongoing discussion on the same, albeit linked to a news article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649644
I think we all knew this was coming but I thought they'd wait a few more months.
It’s probably best not to become too reliant on this technology. We all know where it is going.
unfortunately it had to happen. if anything, i'm surprised it took this long given the sheer volume of funding they've burned through on Free users
“Conversation privacy: We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.”
The same sleight of hand that’s been used by surveillance capitalists for years. It’s not about “selling your data” because they have narrowly defined data to mean “the actual chats you have” and not “information we infer about you from your usage of the service,” which they do sell to advertisers in the form of your behavioral futures.
Fuck all this. OpenAI caved to surveillance capitalism in record time.
Just let me pay to not get ads and for all tiers keep them external to the LLM output
Stuff like this is more reason to build locally, not just depend on the cloud.
no company can survive without advertising. when google first launched, it was the same. chatgpt will follow a similar path, and half a century from now, the cycle will still continue in the same way. advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue. even if this planning seems insignificant for a company’s future today, it will most likely become its greatest advantage.
Does 3M and ASML survive without advertising?
You’ve equated selling ads, like a newspaper does, with tracking user behavior, collating it with other information purchased on the market, and targeting people to change their behavior. Disingenuous.
scale changes, time changes, but at its core it’s similar. what i look at is chatgpt’s roadmap, a lifeline.
it doesn’t save my life, but at least i’m seeing more relevant ads now :) not getting detergent ads while searching for perfume is still nice, all things considered.
Where is the posters disingenuous equation?
Also, your newspaper is selling the data points it has. If it had more, it would sell more. See: your local paper isn’t selling ads to a car wash six towns over. They do, however, sell ads that align with the political affinities of your local newsrooms area.
>advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning attention into revenue.
FTFY
also true, thanks.
Worth askkng, What is the best local LLM solution (including agents) in 2026?
Enshittified, the bright golden AI age began to brown, and regression to the mean once again cast another bleak spell onto humanity. And with that, just as quickly as it broke, another AI winter began. As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value.
> As it turns out, those datacenters were just there to generate shareholder value.
I can't imagine what else anyone could have thought they were there for
Golden promises— Enshittified into sludge; Servers mint cold greed.
Obviously disappointing, but not entirely shocking given how much capital they've already burned through. Convincing individual users to pay $8/mo was never going to even out the balance sheet.
I actually use chatgpt for creating recipes from time to time. I wouldn't be too offended if there's an 'add to amazon' cart button or similar type of add.
What I'm not okay with is being served adds using codex cli, or codex cli gather data outside of my context to send to advertisers. So as long as they're not doing that, I won't complain.
If they start doing that, I'll complain, and I'll need to more heavily sandbox it.
somewhat unrelated, but I've been playing this game with Amazon; when they pop open Rufus and start spewing text at me, I remove everything from my cart, and see how many weeks I can go without shopping at amazon; my current record is 3 weeks, but I think I can do better.
More related, I pay for Kagi, because google results are horrible.
More related, Chatgpt isn't the only model out there, and I've just recently stopped using 5 because it's just slow and there are other models that come back and work just as well. So when Chatgpt starts injecting crap, I'll just stop using them for something else.
What would you do if every time you walked into Walmart and the greeter spit in your face and told you to go F yourself, would you still shop there?
I'm going to start doing this with Rufus too
That's 1/3rd the screen real estate. Can we have longer phones please.
At least put the ads in a consistent location so I can cover it with masking tape
The moment I see an ad in ChatGPT I’m moving to a different model.
If no services remain I’ll run one of my own in the cloud or my server.
Fuck. Ads.
AI is a blender for human culture: it shreds our culture into slop, dumps it into uniform briquettes and adds a bright plastic wrap with ads.