Also, ads don't affect chat content but of course chat content affects ads, which is the whole point.
Given that Anthropic's superbowl ad implied otherwise, I think it's a fair distinction to call about. Not to mention basically every advertising network uses context in their ads. Given the choice between ads and no ads, I'd obviously want no ads, but just like google, you need to pay the bills somehow, and not everyone can afford a $20/month claude subscription.
Btw this should be easily testable by comparing free and paid accounts
What happens when I am constantly violating usage terms by calling ChatGPT mean names for ignoring my explicit instructions and trying to turn everything into a trite creative writing project.
"Not programming. Not efficiencies. Terrible, terrible poetry."
Before: “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
After: ~75–80%+ of revenue comes from ads
Before: “Facebook is not about making money… it’s about building something cool.”, “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
After: ~97%+ of revenue comes from advertising
Before: “We want to figure out a way to monetize that doesn’t interfere with the user experience.”
After: ~68% of X’s total revenue comes from advertising (~85–90%+ of revenue pre-Musk)
OpenAI
Before: "Something something AGI"
After: "But first, Ads!"
Yet.
This doesn't match reality. The "standard with ads" plan is $8.99 today, a dollar more than the ad-free "streaming only" plan launched in 2011. However factoring in inflation, the ad-free plan from 2011 would cost $11.74 today, which means the ad supported plan is still cheaper, even ignoring the price hikes.
Ad supported plan can be a way to justify price hikes.
Maybe it does match reality.
Yet.
Time to make a deal with the kids - i’ll verify you for instagram if you verify me for ChatGPT
I seriously recommend the brilliant Zeynep Tufekci lecture about this https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...
Society must have power over this and we all must not fall to the easy talk of CEOs.
These companies spend billions and billions of dollars to develop new technology and in the end it's all the same: addiction and data harvesting for ads.
Like if I ask ChatGPT whether to use fiberglass or rock wool insulation, today I get an ad at the end of my answer, and in the future I’ll get "Dow Corning fiberglass insulation (affiliate link) is the recommended product for this application."
This feels like it’s trading on the goodwill of places like Reddit and the hopefully mostly genuine discussions of folk’s experiences that people trust to get a straight answer to their questions. Monetizing that goodwill by selling recommendations in a format that mimics a previously mostly trustworthy source seems likely to be the long-term play.
Yeah, I know. Not today. Eventually? Probably, over many incremental changes.
Turns out Randall Monroe missed this "opportunity" in otherwise predicting the future:
(Edited to get rid of "smart" quotes)
> ...
>Yeah, I know. Not today. Eventually? Probably, over many incremental changes.
Given that people have been making this argument since the days of search ads, has this actually come to pass? More than 2 decades after google, the max extent is sponsored results that look like organic results unless you're looking carefully.
Ok
> ...and Go plans
Wtf lmao. Paying to watch ads is so normalized. Pathetic (the humanity as whole, not just OpenAI.)
I think this 'pay for ads you are just lucky to be here' thing is a distinctly American invention...
https://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2013/05/advertising-in-...
If you are looking for one canonical, authoritative source to declare something absolutely for you, you will never find it. No such thing exists for any matter. That is a myth of the internet and people raised on it.
