What if their AGI/ASI told them the road to Humanity betterment (because you know that was OpenAI initial mission, just in case we forgot) was through more efficient ads ? /s
AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy.
IIRC, a part of the backstory of Idiocracy is the development of pervasive and good enough AI/automation, which enables society to get that dumb without immediately collapsing.
This sounds awful. AI Chatbots will be everywhere Shopify is. I just see a lot of popups in our future with fake names and faces pretending to be people asking us how they can help us.
As usual with AI customer interaction, I have to ask who is liable for misleading advertising or unmet promises? The advertiser who isn't really in control of the chatbot, or OpenAI?
(Law on this goes all the way back to Carbolic Smoke Ball)
Liability... come on what's this pesky detail when it's an arm race with China (or whatever the weekly scapegoat is), don't you want the good guys to win? /s
Honestly I wish every ad had this. If I search for meal delivery services in my area and a sponsored result comes up, I would much rather ask an AI to trawl through the website to find out how much the meals cost, how much meat, protein, calories, etc are in them rather than do it myself
Yeah, but why would you trust the answers from a sponsored agent? Why would you assume it is giving you real, accurate, and complete information rather than selectively giving you what it thinks is most likely to make you click the "buy" button?
I'm definitely more pro ad than the average HN user (I think they occasionally show me products I want to buy), but this seems bad and one step closer to "the LLM is biased by openai's financial interests."
In the example of a "sponsored agent" at the top, how many people are going to think "chat with us" is just a way to continue the conversation? How soon before openai removes the friction of clicking that entirely?
this is what openai said before: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled." https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
Do they need to rewrite that section? Because in the video there's an LLM chatbot inside the chatgpt app writing answers on behalf of "Heirloom grocery"
Disagree. I pitched this exact model to Google Search when we first started making LLMs. The idea was the bots were separate clearly from the core model so you’ll know when you were having a branded experience or not. And it s useful beyond ads. It can be for customer service or MCP interaction with the service directly.
yeah, I can see it as useful in customer service, but they're adding these sponsored agents directly in the chatgpt app. the word "ad" or "sponsored" isn't visible after you click "chat with us" at 0:15 in the video, only "learn more about business chats" which is vague. and if you scroll down you won't even see that, if someone switches apps for 20 minutes are they going to remember that this chat window is an ad?
This is awfully unimaginative. I don’t see people using this. Where is the incentive to continue your conversation with the sponsored agent as opposed to, you know, the one you’re already talking to.
How else are they to monetize text outputs? This was always the plan and it's going to get much worse (or better depending on which side of the fence you're on). Google did the same thing when it controlled web indexation: ads, sponsored results and SEO. All of these things will be coming to agents: you will be monetized or you will be paying not to be.
They could stick to taking payment in exchange for service like some weird old-fashioned business, but I guess that doesn't get the sort of growth that justifies a trillion-dollar valuation.
I guess we’re about to find out if this helps put out the massive pile of burning cash that OpenAI is trying to deal with, but I know nobody that wants this.
OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
Like Uber and Lyft showed in the last cycle, AI has now reached the milestone where the game shifts from "offer unreasonably cheap service by burning investor money and gain marketshare" to "shit we need to show a profit".
Now we start to see what the enshittification movement can do to this space.
The problem with ads in AI, is that they're incredibly creepy. People have told the apps all kinds of sensitive information that they never would have told a normal service. Obviously the advertisers are creaming themselves at that, but it's a new level of creeping.
It also allows them to subtly influence the messaging. It would be like if somebody tried to not bring out the Heinz at a family gathering. It just wouldn't be the same, because of the subtle messaging that has been inserted into the content. How could you trust them?
"Nuke the entire site from orbit ... it's the only way to be sure."
None of this would be necessary if they thought they were actually anywhere near AGI...hmm.
What if their AGI/ASI told them the road to Humanity betterment (because you know that was OpenAI initial mission, just in case we forgot) was through more efficient ads ? /s
Sounds like the plot of a Douglas Adam’s book
They'll have to find a smarter species to emulate first. My money's on the octopus!
Excellent way to put it.
It’s always he guys who steal the technology from the inventors that try to present the technology far beyond what it is.
Signed, that guy at google who did some stuff about this and had it taken away.
Turns out, just like the Turing test, its easier to dumb down intelligent expectations than to improve intelligence.
AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy.
I wish more people could read and appreciate that couple of sentences.
IIRC, a part of the backstory of Idiocracy is the development of pervasive and good enough AI/automation, which enables society to get that dumb without immediately collapsing.
This sounds awful. AI Chatbots will be everywhere Shopify is. I just see a lot of popups in our future with fake names and faces pretending to be people asking us how they can help us.
2036
Synthetic humans wearing the faces of your loved ones surreptitiously cross your path, and casually mention their favorite products and services.
That's pretty much most T1 support already. I feel like all I do is talk to bots.
I think we're already there with that stupid AI customer support widget every obnoxious website has now.
As usual with AI customer interaction, I have to ask who is liable for misleading advertising or unmet promises? The advertiser who isn't really in control of the chatbot, or OpenAI?
(Law on this goes all the way back to Carbolic Smoke Ball)
Liability... come on what's this pesky detail when it's an arm race with China (or whatever the weekly scapegoat is), don't you want the good guys to win? /s
It cannot be the AI vendor, according to what they say they are purely passive, think of them like a very large harness for their AI models.
It’s not the advertising companies of course, as you said they don’t control the system.
And it cannot be the models, because they don’t have personhood.
So, I guess it’s on nobody? Funny how those things happen to work, uh
/s
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine on this topic, available at all good bookstores near you.
Honestly I wish every ad had this. If I search for meal delivery services in my area and a sponsored result comes up, I would much rather ask an AI to trawl through the website to find out how much the meals cost, how much meat, protein, calories, etc are in them rather than do it myself
You can already do that without ads.
The point of ads is that one of those services will pay openai so that their services will be more prominent than the others.
No you can’t. Not without MCP
Most agents can search the web nowadays
Yeah, but why would you trust the answers from a sponsored agent? Why would you assume it is giving you real, accurate, and complete information rather than selectively giving you what it thinks is most likely to make you click the "buy" button?
I'm definitely more pro ad than the average HN user (I think they occasionally show me products I want to buy), but this seems bad and one step closer to "the LLM is biased by openai's financial interests."
In the example of a "sponsored agent" at the top, how many people are going to think "chat with us" is just a way to continue the conversation? How soon before openai removes the friction of clicking that entirely?
this is what openai said before: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled." https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
Do they need to rewrite that section? Because in the video there's an LLM chatbot inside the chatgpt app writing answers on behalf of "Heirloom grocery"
Disagree. I pitched this exact model to Google Search when we first started making LLMs. The idea was the bots were separate clearly from the core model so you’ll know when you were having a branded experience or not. And it s useful beyond ads. It can be for customer service or MCP interaction with the service directly.
yeah, I can see it as useful in customer service, but they're adding these sponsored agents directly in the chatgpt app. the word "ad" or "sponsored" isn't visible after you click "chat with us" at 0:15 in the video, only "learn more about business chats" which is vague. and if you scroll down you won't even see that, if someone switches apps for 20 minutes are they going to remember that this chat window is an ad?
This is awfully unimaginative. I don’t see people using this. Where is the incentive to continue your conversation with the sponsored agent as opposed to, you know, the one you’re already talking to.
The fact that it requires a user action to initiate is better than the previous solution, but that's a pretty low bar to have
How else are they to monetize text outputs? This was always the plan and it's going to get much worse (or better depending on which side of the fence you're on). Google did the same thing when it controlled web indexation: ads, sponsored results and SEO. All of these things will be coming to agents: you will be monetized or you will be paying not to be.
They could stick to taking payment in exchange for service like some weird old-fashioned business, but I guess that doesn't get the sort of growth that justifies a trillion-dollar valuation.
It has for Anthropic. Consumer vs enterprise though I guess.
Without the pesky training costs or stock compensation taken into account, yes.
By making more money from inference subscriptions than they lose on compute, training, and other costs?
Here I foolishly thought that that was the job of ChatGPT itself.
It's funny that at first OpenAI didn't want to add ads, but if they are adding them, they will be as dystopian as possible.
Who actually wants this?
I guess we’re about to find out if this helps put out the massive pile of burning cash that OpenAI is trying to deal with, but I know nobody that wants this.
OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
Nobody wants this. We only need them to offer propaganda as a service and the enshitification will be complete.
Isn't that primarily what they offer anyway? So "subscription required" would check that box.
Who wants any ads?
Investors
Sam Altman. It is his last resort, he said some time ago (which is not true, regulation/"slowing down the pace of AI" seems to be the latest).
the only person who ever interacts with these will be the person who accidentally clicked on them. Surely they know this?
Soon, everybody will live in Truman show.
I dont think its that bad. Another opportunity for businesses
Like Uber and Lyft showed in the last cycle, AI has now reached the milestone where the game shifts from "offer unreasonably cheap service by burning investor money and gain marketshare" to "shit we need to show a profit".
Now we start to see what the enshittification movement can do to this space.
So you can pay $8 a month and see ads while using the already pared down offering.
I think pushing back with cancellations is the only way forward.
I wish ads never existed.
The future is open source, no subscriptions, no purchases, 100% free and community supported.
The sooner software gets to this point, the world will be a much more better place rather than everything being a subscription.
Found this:
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
The problem with ads in AI, is that they're incredibly creepy. People have told the apps all kinds of sensitive information that they never would have told a normal service. Obviously the advertisers are creaming themselves at that, but it's a new level of creeping.
It also allows them to subtly influence the messaging. It would be like if somebody tried to not bring out the Heinz at a family gathering. It just wouldn't be the same, because of the subtle messaging that has been inserted into the content. How could you trust them?