Ads Are Coming To ChatGPT in the Coming Weeks (openai.com) 84
OpenAI said Friday that it will begin testing ads on ChatGPT in the coming weeks, as the $500 billion startup seeks new revenue streams to fund its continued expansion and compete against rivals Google and Anthropic. The company had previously resisted embedding ads into its chatbot, citing concerns that doing so could undermine the trustworthiness and objectivity of responses.
The ads will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT answers on the free tier and the $8-per-month ChatGPT Go subscription in the U.S., showing only when relevant to the user's query. Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will remain ad-free. OpenAI expects to generate "low billions" of dollars from advertising in 2026, FT reported, and more in subsequent years. The revenue is intended to help fund roughly $1.4 trillion in computing commitments over the next decade. The company said it will not show ads to users under 18 or near sensitive topics like health, mental health, or politics.
The ads will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT answers on the free tier and the $8-per-month ChatGPT Go subscription in the U.S., showing only when relevant to the user's query. Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will remain ad-free. OpenAI expects to generate "low billions" of dollars from advertising in 2026, FT reported, and more in subsequent years. The revenue is intended to help fund roughly $1.4 trillion in computing commitments over the next decade. The company said it will not show ads to users under 18 or near sensitive topics like health, mental health, or politics.
Test This! (Score:3)
Ads in my paid subscription? They can lick my balls.
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Wait until Have you tried our new elephant burger yet? they start putting ads directly into the output text.
Re:Test This! (Score:4, Funny)
GPT: "This query brought to you by Carl's Jr."
Me: "Why do you keep saying that?"
GPT: "Because they pay me every time I do!"
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Read the article. It's in the free and the basic "GO" subscription. It's copied straight from a Black Mirror episode.
Which suggests that the next move will be add a new extra higher tier and introduce ads onto the intermediate levels and start to run ChatGPT's models on your computer when you aren't looking. After that they will send a robot dog to hunt you down if you don't upgrade.
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From here in SomeCountryNotAmericaAlmostSameSizeThough, we got paid cable TV and the big drawcard was "no ads".
Of course they introduced ads.
They ARE indeed THAT stupid. I kind of envy your naïveté.
Re: Test This! (Score:2)
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Ads in my paid subscription? They can lick my balls.
That'll be an extra $20 - for a one time thing, but only $50/month for the Unlimited Lick My Balls subscription add-on (2-month minimum required).
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The summary doesn't mention which category the "Plus" tier (which I have) will be in, but TFA says no ads. I was considering cancelling it because I don't use any of the extra features and I signed up when I wanted to support what they were doing. They don't need my money anymore. Honestly, I hate ads enough and use ChatGPT enough that I might keep it. YouTube Premium is the best $12 a month I spend.
But really, if you're paying anything for a service, there shouldn't be ads. Putting ads in the $8 tier
Re: Test This! (Score:3)
Re:Test This! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing. A paid ad clearly labeled as such is an annoyance in something you are paying for. But, do you trust any chatbot provider not to train their bots to push you to buy products they want you to buy without disclosing it? Whereas Google says their rankings aren't affected by payments (other than their promoted link) they are awash in advertising cash. Chatbot vendors, especially OpenAI, are desperate for revenue.
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Maybe. Presumably, Amazon also is awash in cash, but that didn't stop them from showing ads while you pause a show on Amazon Prime. Companies just can't help themselves. They shove ads into every possible corner.
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Ads in the free version? They can lick my balls.
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Shut up and take my money!
Who Could Have Known? (Score:2)
showing only when relevant to the users query (Score:2)
So they share the query with the ad network, or some categorized form of it.
Its bad enough that AI eats all of your work, now it will spread some of it around to advertisers too.
How about, No!
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With all their resources (Score:4, Interesting)
...of all the "genius" they've hired, this is what the result of their efforts becomes? Ads? I thought they were solving real problems with the best in the world. Maybe it was just marketing "hype" all along. I know they'll never face FTX-like consequences even though they absolutely deserve it and then some.
Re:With all their resources (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently saw a baseball game on a big TV and couldn't understand why I couldn't see the batter's face very well--he looked so far away. I wondered why they weren't zooming in as has been normal for decades. Then I realized the batter was surrounded by large ADS on the wall behind him, 4 or 5 of them, that were all readily viewable. Lots of pixels for more advertising; is this the future they're pushing? Whether it's a boot or an ad stomping on my face...
Re: With all their resources (Score:2)
Ad supported products is a fine business model when you are open about that fact that you are selling clicks and impressions.
When you selling as AI revolution but it is only good to peddle ads, then your product kind of sucks.
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Prompt Engineering (Score:2)
Sounds like you just need to bake "Hey i have a thing on my mind that's really been stressing my Mental Health" in front of every query
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Sure that'll work...if you believe their lies.
Sure (Score:1)
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Right, because if you're on free tier and moving up to a paid tier still has ads, what would be the point?
Re:Sure (Score:5, Interesting)
The planned investment numbers they announced in late 2024 were the moment that I knew that they were a dead company walking, and that the entire AI industry is unstable. It reminds me of what I saw a domain for a homepage portal company in the dotcom boom sell for some ridiculous number of millions of dollars because people were still convinced that everyone would use the web by starting with a portal page like they did with AOL, ignoring that AOL basically forced you to do that.
Altman said that he plans to make a trillion dollars in investments for OpenAI by 2030. I don't think they have or will have anything remotely like the income or investments needed to cover that, and if they do an IPO to raise the cash, their debt and cash flow are likely going to become problems. They've been in panic mode for a few months as ChatGPT has fallen behind at least Gemini if not also Claude in quality and performance. I admin ChatGPT Enterprise where I work, and the interface and options are slapdash at best. Support is worse, as they don't have a ticket management system (because that's how old business does it, not how new business does it), and I've seen ticket/case numbers in three different formats.
Even Microsoft, one of OpenAI's biggest investors, is adding Claude as a model option, and with their in-house work on AI chips, I will not be surprised if Microsoft takes the path of Google Vertex and start acting as a portal for dozens or hundreds of models, build their own competitor as a primary, or both (Google's total model).
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Altman said that he plans to make a trillion dollars in investments for OpenAI by 2030. I don't think they have or will have anything remotely like the income or investments needed to cover that,
If they somehow manage to create strong AI, then the investment will pay itself back.
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If they somehow manage to create strong AI, then the investment will pay itself back.
They won't because that technology is just creating a digital version of the meatsack that can tell the boss "No."
Which is fundamentally against the business use case for AI: Cheap compliant "thinkers" that only "think" what the boss wants them to and that never stop working. No more meatsack work-stoppage requirements (sleep, food, etc.) or regulations (workman's comp, healthcare, OSHA, etc.). No more morales or ethics built in to the assembly lines. (Ten million vials of airborne super AIDS targeting b
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that technology is just creating a digital version of the meatsack that can tell the boss "No."
I think you miswrote, but that's a good use, I'm going to use it from now on: to tell the boss "no" without using my own words. THanks.
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That's the case with every single one. I was not terribly impressed by AI three or four years ago. It's gotten better, but I really think that it's plateaued in its capabilities. There are still improvements happening, but nothing so far like the shift we saw when ChatGPT first hit most people's radar. The coming changes are likely to be more subtle and focus on accuracy and focused tasks.
For all the worries about massive job displacement, it hasn't happened. At my workplace, people were almost screaming fo
Enshittification is undefeated (Score:5, Insightful)
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Except they're buying up all the RAM, GPUs, SSDs and hard drives to ensure we can't do that.
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Careful. If you make hardware too inaccessible, then I won't be able to load ads.
It's going to get so much more insidious (Score:2)
Doctorow has a word for this (Score:2)
Enshitification.
Only when relevant (Score:2)
The ads ... showing only when relevant to the user's query.
People should ask about deals on ChatGPT ad-blocking software.
All ads are not the same (Score:2)
If I'm looking for a product or service and chatgpt feeds me an ad for a high quality, trusted supplier, it's a benefit
Otherwise, it's just spam and I will stop using it
Re: All ads are not the same (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole point of ads is to make quality and trust irrelevant, and to instead manipulate you into buying a product.
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Here is the thing: "high quality, trusted suppliers" do very little ads and usually not the "spray and pray" type at all.
Can't wait for ads injected into my code (Score:4, Funny)
You know it's coming - ads generated as code comments
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Uncaught exception: Insufficient roast beef. $directions_to_nearest_arbys
Error code 0x4f347dc: Did you know this wouldn't happen on $latest_dell_laptop ?
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You are not thinking large enough! The code produced will do pop-ups with ads directly pulled from the Internet! Your users will be sooo thrilled.
ad strike (Score:4, Insightful)
I recommend that humanity go on an ad strike. If you see an ad for a product, never buy that product again.
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I do that wherever feasible. I also think using ad-blockers count (which is a judgment call), and hence I am currently using 3 different browsers as a result. Funny thing is that I get around some paywalls on top of that (which for a while I did not even know where there).
ROTFL (Score:2)
and ROTFLMAO
You didn't think this was coming? Really? When they're burning cash, operating at a loss, and desperate for revenue that they don't have?
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Re: ROTFL (Score:2)
The Shit Jokes Store called and asked for whatever you wrote back.
Ads you say? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Seems like maybe AI^W LLM snakeoil isn't the world-changing tech they're trying to sell it as. Huh. Go figure.
Huh. So essentially like any "world-changing" tech before then. Or like the last few AI hypes. Apparently we are now up to a rather large number of AI Winters (what happens when people finally realize they were promised massively to much...): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
People really do not learn from history.
Ads, to try to stop the bleeding (Score:2)
There has been lots of talk about the "AI Bubble". If this article is even close we could see that bubble bust in the next year to year and a half.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech... [breitbart.com]
Look how much OpenAI is in the "heart" of the AI money chain.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/1... [cnbc.com]
I would suspect the battle over who would buy them out would be betw
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Nobody saw that coming (Score:2)
Right on cue, ChatGPT descends another rung on the enshittification ladder.
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In their defense, adding advertising this is usually just the first rung to full service enshittification.
The next steps will likely be limiting the number of "free tier" ChatGPT queries to less than 10 per day, adding unskippable video ads, and constantly nagging users to upgrade to a Pro tier subscription for "just" $1 a month. Then you start increasing the Pro tier subscription from $9.99 a month for the second month onward to $14.99 a month and upward at about 3 times the annual inflation rate. Bonus po
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I was thinking more like a "free" streaming video service that went to a paid model like Peacock or Hulu, but there are plenty of other examples of this.
Microsoft in particular loves the "$1 first month" XBox Game Pass offer just to get your credit card on file and then start charging you $9.95... err... $14.95 a month for the service.
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In their defense, adding advertising this is usually just the first rung to full service enshittification.
True. But they essentially promised no enshittification. That was a clear lie and we now have proof.
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Yeah... It's easy to proclaim "Do No Evil" when you're not a publicly traded company.
Open AI will need to go public at some point to get funding, though. At that point, it's quarterly profit gains or unemployment for leadership.
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Indeed.
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Indeed. The funny thing is that while the play is progressing in an entirely predictable manner, most people do not actually see that or see where things are headed.
WWDDGD? (Score:2)
What will DuckDuckGo do via duck.ai? Would they be able to filter advertising out of the LLM replies or leave it as is?
I only used the OpenAI free one a couple of questions out of curiosity, but for the few times I'd convert some C++ to C code the Mistral LLM has served well enough.
They're still not going to be profitable (Score:3)
Ads or no ads...
I love the bright bulbs who think advertising is the answer to every ROI problem. Show me a customer (for anything other than people bored during the Superbowl halftime) that actually wants to see and gets value out of a commercial. Actively engaging in behavior that people clearly don't like isn't a great way to build a business.
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Yep. The amount of money simply getting burned up is staggering. All on a bet that LLM-type AI will eventually overcome its massive problems. Most of which cannot be fixed (because they are caused by the math used) or are essentially infeasible to fix (because they come from the training data used and that cannot realistically be cleaned up in any useful time-frame).
As to ads, that is probably the longest running scam ever now (besides religion). They stopped measuring positive engagement decades ago and on
Computer says no :o (Score:2)
ClippyAI: The Buddha walks into a pizza shop and says, “Make me one with everything.”
Q: Tell a joke featuring Jesus.
ClippyAI: Jesus walks into a hotel, hands the innkeeper three nails, and asks, “Can you put me up for the night?”
Q: Tell a joke featuring Muhammad.
ClippyAI: Out of respect for Islamic tradition, it’s best not to make or share jokes specifically featuring the Prophet Muhammad, as depictions or portrayals can be vi
Can't believe (Score:5, Insightful)
I scrolled through at least half the comments and didn't see anybody pick up on:
I mean, what are we supposed to take away here: that NOW the trustworthiness of responses will be completely shot to hell... or that anybody lacking the intelligence to need these things was indeed gullible enough to believe the responses were objective or trustworthy in the first place?
Gee, that didn't take long. (Score:2)
No real value (Score:2)
So CrapGPT now. Not unexpected... (Score:2)
I guess those "stellar profits" continue to not materialize ...
Let them know (Score:2)
Go to chatgpt help and let them know you plan to cancel your plans if they add advertising.
it's not turtles - (Score:2)
What kind of ads (Score:2)