Are we ready for OpenAI to put ads into ChatGPT?

Imagine you’re talking to someone and they suddenly start to add advertising to the exchange. What might that look like? In a 1965 episode of the classic sitcom I Dream of Jeannie , the protagonist uses her magical powers to create fake parents for herself in order to impress a date. She crafts them to be “just like the people on television commercials,” making them speak using sentences from commercials. Her synthetic “parents” appear friendly and normal—until they start talking, reciting ads verbatim for products like “streak-away” for gray hair, dish soap, “Grippo” denture adhesive, and deodorant. They have so much to say, yet communicate nothing at all. Something similar might happen if OpenAI goes forward with its rumored plans to add advertising to ChatGPT. Last December, an article in Futurism , citing internal sources at OpenAI, suggested ad adoption could be near. Recently, The Information reported that the company is hiring “digital advertising veterans” and that it will install a secondary model capable of evaluating if a conversation “has commercial intent,” before offering up relevant ads in the chat responses. Annoying ads within ChatGPT could be for things as banal as a grocery product, a local destination to visit, or a handyman service. But they could also be a lot of something else—something dangerous. Given ChatGPT’s track record , some poor soul might be pouring their heart out to the chatbot, only to be advised of a special on rope at their local hardware store. I’m not making light of the latter—It could happen. There can’t be true oversight with LLMs. And that’s only one of their problems. Context is the Holy Grail OpenAI’s advertising move is a bold and brilliant, but potentially terrible, crude attempt to automate contextual “understanding,” a missing link with the push toward combining big data and surveillance. For a long time, newspapers and radio stations were local and distributed. As transportation connected us and technology improved, the opportunity to distribute more centralized news from single, larger sources became possible. Television began with a few channels and concentrated programming that was the same across broad regions. This ushered in a heyday for advertisers who sponsored TV content and could show single ads to millions of viewers. As a distributed technology, the internet disrupted many forms of traditional media, and advertisers have been scrambling to try to reach us in new ways. While technology has enabled advertisers to benefit from our location in an attempt to hone in on what might appeal to us, internet ads are often not contextually relevant to what we want or need. What OpenAI intends to do with advertising, via ChatGPT’s self-reported 900 million weekly users, will synthesize the local distributed model. This will enable the platform to reach into our homes in the same way that mass television once possessed. It’s an attempt to unify and bypass the interfaces of phones and computers that we currentlyuse. In the process, OpenAI willbe creating a “super platform” for informational use and processing....

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