This single sentence probably took so many man-hours. I completely understand why they’re trying to integrate ads but this feels like a generational run for a company founded with the purpose of safely researching superintelligence.

I've heard this before...

The same sleight of hand that’s been used by surveillance capitalists for years. It’s not about “selling your data” because they have narrowly defined data to mean “the actual chats you have” and not “information we infer about you from your usage of the service,” which they do sell to advertisers in the form of your behavioral futures.

Fuck all this. OpenAI caved to surveillance capitalism in record time.

What I'm not okay with is being served adds using codex cli, or codex cli gather data outside of my context to send to advertisers. So as long as they're not doing that, I won't complain.

If they start doing that, I'll complain, and I'll need to more heavily sandbox it.

More related, I pay for Kagi, because google results are horrible.

More related, Chatgpt isn't the only model out there, and I've just recently stopped using 5 because it's just slow and there are other models that come back and work just as well. So when Chatgpt starts injecting crap, I'll just stop using them for something else.

What would you do if every time you walked into Walmart and the greeter spit in your face and told you to go F yourself, would you still shop there?

What you’re reacting to isn’t just “ads.” It’s the feeling of: Someone monetizing the collective output of human thought while quietly severing the link back to the humans who produced it.

That triggers a very old and very valid moral instinct.

Why “sleazy” is an accurate word here

“Sleazy” usually means: technically allowed strategically clever morally evasive

When first trying 5.2, on a "Pro" plan, I was - and still am - able to trigger the shopping assistant via keyword-matching, even if the conversation context, or the prompt itself, is wildly inappropriate (suicide, racism, etc).

Keyword-matching seems a strange ad strategy for a (non-profit) company selling QKV. It's all very confusing!

Hopefully, for fans of personal super-assistants--and advertising--worldwide, this will improve now that ads have been formalised.

Edit: they made sure to use the word "trust" 5 times because nothing is more trustworthy than someone telling you how trustworthy they are.

> And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall

We shall be good. Pinky promise.

The free and $8 new “Go” tier will include ads.

Are they mincing words here? By selling your data they mean they'll never package the raw chats and send them whoever is buying ads. Ok, neither does Google. But they'll clearly build detailed profiles on every preference or product you mention, your age, your location, etc. so they know what ads to show you? "See this is not your data, it's just preference bits".

They didn’t even start with free, already a paid subscription included.

From an ethical standpoint, I think it's .. murky. Not ads themselves, but because the AI is, at least partially, likely trained on data scraped from the web, which is then more or less regurgitated (in a personalized way) and then presented with ads that do not pay the original content creators. So it's kind of like, lets consume what other people created, repackage it, and then profit off of it.

(I continue to be shocked how many people—who should know better—are in denial that the entire "industry" of Generative AI is completely and utterly unsustainable and furthermore on a level of unsustainability we've never before seen in the history of computer technology.)

Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely), they are under immense immediate financial pressure to produce revenue (I presume most likely) or there is simply no development on the horizon big enough to justify the shift - so just do it now.

I guess in the meantime, they will be able to use chat histories to personalize ads on a whole new level. I bet we will see some screenshots of uncomfortably relevant ads in the coming months.

I'm out.