115 points by shantnutiwari11 days ago | 65 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
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.
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...
Never pay to avoid ads. Signals you've got money to waste, makes your attention even more valuable. You're paying to self-segment into the upper echelons of the market.
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?
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.
Prohibition doesn't have great precedent for digital spaces though - most ad-blocking law targets physical billboards and public space, not software you've licensed. The closer analogue is subscription services quietly adding ads after lock-in, which regulators have mostly left alone so far.
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!
> 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.
That is... not interesting. That is how the ad supported web worked for the past 20 years.
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.
Ads mean tracking pixels, A/B tests, extra latency, another vendor SDK in the request path. When that breaks at 3am nobody's rolling it back for "engagement metrics." Good luck debugging why chat responses got slow.
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... ;)
Easy to mock ads when you're still burning VC cash. Question is whether Anthropic holds that line once free-tier users need to pay for themselves somehow, or if "ads" just show up relabeled as something else.
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?
Ads on setting paid plans of OpenAI says more about the state of the company itself rather then the ads they put. There is an interview where Sam Altman said OpenAI won't be putting Ads on any of their plans including the free plan unless as a last result. This basically means they will only put ads if they keep losing money from running their large data centers and AI isn't profitable. So ads on the Free plan generally mean we need money while ads on paid plans means are at the worst of the worst and we desperately need funding. Because when you think about it, OpenAI would never put ads even on a Free plan because it will only drive its users to its competitors like Gemini, Claude and so on. Either way this is just my take on the situation.
"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.
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.
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
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?
I think there will definitely be a point where code generators require a payment method to be registered before they can be used, and then generate code for paid products that it automatically subscribes you to.
WordPress and WooCommerce? Nah, here's how you set up a Squarespace Ecommerce site - if you hit publish, you'll be auto-subscribed to their $20/month plan.
It can be understood that the era of llm is merely an inheritor of the Internet. OpenAI is just another company that hasn't reached the same scale as Meta.
Free tier subsidized by ads, paid tier ad-free, that's the deal since forever. AOL did this in the 90s. Difference now is the $8 tier used to feel like the "no ads" escape hatch and isn't anymore.
