alt Hacker NewsTell HN: OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs
I was on the £6.99/month program-- mainly because I didnt use it much. Last few days I've started seeing ads:
1. Ad for Financial Times 2. Add for Shein 3. Add for Amazon prime day
All 3 were on a chat where I was asking about tips on a mobile game.
Needless to say, I cancelled my plan. Im not paying money to see ads
Comments
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?
Open AI attended the annual Cannes Ad Festival this year, alongside the usual Google, Meta etc
They have 900m users and 50m of them are paying.
Ads are inevitable. Surprised they put them on a paid plan user like you, but they are IPO'ing this year and need to show the best numbers possible.
Didn't Anthropic create a series of commercials poking fun at OpenAI for putting ads in their chat? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTT55qFdyss
Yes their $8 (or equivalent) tier does have ads. It says so on https://chatgpt.com/pricing.
I knew this would happen, the future of AI, is ads, lots of them. This isn’t the end, there will be more added on soon
"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.
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?
They have been putting ads in the free and ‘go’ plans
Are the ads static or appear in a way that would make them recognized easily so that a uBlock Origin rules remove them?
That's a way to reduce lost income from former clients.
> Ad for Financial Times
Pay to see ads of products where you also pay to see ads :)
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?
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.
The most generic ad inventory. Personalized or content relevant ads is still fantasy I see
Mildly disappointed that it is not the dystopian adpocalypse we were warned against
This has been known to be rolling out for a long time.
Netflix and Disney opened this box long ago when they introduced their “cheap with ads” plan and it’s their most popular subscription types.
The invisible hand of the market has spoken and people prefer advertisements over paying more.
Sad reality but unless we change the incentives this is going to happen with everything.
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.