[czep]

> You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers.

> we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.

There is a severe disjoint between these two statements: the advertiser now knows what your conversation was about! This gives a lot of leverage to ad campaigns to design the targeting criteria very specifically crafted to identify the exact behavioral and interest segments they want.

[charcircuit]

It doesn't know what it's about. It just knows that their product was relevant to it. I don't think this is a big deal. It's like saying that if a user downloads a gacha game, then the game studio learns that the user is likely interested in gacha games. Learning that a user was talking about gacha games with ChatGPT does not really give any additional information.

[neumann]

Approach it from the other angle - what scenario would it be bad in. It's not hard to see very real possibilities in the short term where it does matter: A 16yro looks up on chatGPT how she can check discreetly whether she is pregnant or not and what potential avenues she has. The advertiser could literally by anyone targeting pregnancies, including government or action groups who now have some information about that user's conversations in this scenario.

Any data exfiltration or reporting on the users would quickly be developed by the industry to merge this information and improve inferences with confidence values on target populations/individuals.

[charcircuit]

You don't need ChatGPT to know that someone buying a pregnancy kit from you has an above average chance to be pregnant.

[wizzwizz4]

Who said they had to buy it to leak the information?

[charcircuit]

Replace the word buy with view and it will still be true.

[wizzwizz4]

But if they're only viewing it because it was put on their screen by ChatGPT, that's a non-consensual leak of personal information to the advertiser.

[thmsths]

Hard disagree. Advertisers (or people with worse motives) will be very creative in how they use the targeting parameters offered by chatGPT ads and suddenly they can make educated guesses about groups or even individuals. I remember a couple years ago, someone posted a story about how they were able to circumvent Facebook rules and display ads for just one person: their roommates and used that to freak them out.

[upcoming-sesame]

This feels like the end of a nice era, we all knew its coming but enjoyed an ad free experience while it lasted

[whazor]

I also have questions about the data flows. 1. If I have a conversation about robotic cats, will OpenAI share how many people like me talk about this topic? 2. If I click an ad, will OpenAI share why the ad was relevant to the advertisement.

Anyways, I think they will be doing both. So conversation data would not be sold to advertisers, but statistics will be given freely.