Official post: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-exp... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649577)

It's hard not to see the sort of flailing about with acquisitions and choices as anything but a lack of confidence.

Ads are just the capitalist's patriotic ascent into the "I know this is useless to society, but people sure love to talk about it!" capitalization.

If it can talk people into suicide [0] then surely it can talk them into buying stuff.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/openai-chatgpt-suicide-law...

Sadly, this doesn't surprise me. ChatGPT is scam tech that doesn't have a way of making legitimate revenue.

Once ads start to make their way up to the Plus paid tiers (and they will), I’ll probably switch to something else like local LLM on my home machine or put something together myself to use a non adware LLM via API (for example with Replicate). Especially if these are just intended to be spammy blocks at bottom or in between discussion threads, or worse, audio conversations.

From what I’ve read, this will be about ads in chat as suggestions? So “active” ads on response?

Why not go the approach of passive background “agentic” ad suggestions like, “hey, we know X, Y, and Z about you - would you like us to monitor certain brands related to your interests for deals and allow advertisers to pitch these deals to you?” And make these hyper specific so you can opt in.

I, like many people who dabble with music as a hobby, have GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) - why not let me toggle something like “ok, I don’t want ads, but if any of your partnered brands have a sale or good deal on X, feel free to email me, and use your ChatGPT smarts to pitch me on why it’s a good deal and how it suits my current gear set up”

I used ChatGPT to set up my guitar pedal board so surely this isn’t a huge leap.

Advertising is a two way street into the content and meaning behind your otherwise private conversations with a chatbot.

Truth I even shocked myself by dropping my ChatGPT subscription

Between Claude and Gemini it just wasnt needed.

Will openai by the MySpace of this era?

ChatGPT with ads (in this initial proposed form) still seems better than Gemini with these stupid video recommendations I can't turn off, because they do influence the answer itself (the model itself might give me less details just to make me watch the video).