Tell HN: OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs

[shantnutiwari]

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

[kylemaxwell]

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.

[21asdffdsa12]

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...

[Cider9986]

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)

[aesthesia]

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.

[21asdffdsa12]

Me, im not myself when hungry, but you do you ..

[everforward]

> 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.

[avgDev]

I think the ads would be more targeted. You ask it about code, and it suggests a paid library or an app that you can pay for.

It is quite interesting problem, because you could just respond with ok I want you to write whatever that library does. I don't want to pay for this.

If my business was a large CRUD app, like CRM I would be worried about smaller apps popping up on the market.

[jstummbillig]

When ethics become hilarious.

[21asdffdsa12]

Important is to have a illusion of choice, a play-thing of liberty. A painted on door. Buttons for settings that do nothing. Freedom is the illusion of choice.

[senordevnyc]

So edgy.

[drcongo]

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

[SOTGO]

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?

[paxys]

Their entire ads rollout is recent.

[khurs]

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.

[zb3]

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!

[paxys]

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.

[cess11]

"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.

[paganartifact]

Is hanging flyers allowed in your dystopia

[hightrix]

Ads are inevitable.

Enshittification is inevitable.

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

[gravel7623]

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]

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... ;)

[paxys]

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

[pulvinar]

"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.

[daft_pink]

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]

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

[mysterydip]

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?

[stranded22]

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

[elashri]

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

[throwatdem12311]

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

[6stringmerc]

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.

[zb3]

> Ad for Financial Times

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

[bflesch]

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?

[christkv]

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

[blourvim]

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

[thrance]

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

[blourvim]

Ah, wise words. There is still time indeed

[throwatdem12311]

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.