Tell HN: OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs
86
sshantnutiwari about 3 hours ago 37 comments
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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
Discussion (37 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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...
A woman needs this treatment after a brain injury. Iirc it clones her brain onto their servers. It's super experimental, it's a free surgery with a subscription service where you need to be within the supported area like cell towers.
If she stops paying for the service she will die. They promised to expand the support area to more countries and areas, but they end up raising prices as well as adding in advertising.
The advertising takes over her body at random contextual times and she basically does an ad read to the people in whatever situation.
It starts happening at the school where she works, she tells a kid about a certain product after he asks her about a problem. She's gonna lose her job because it creeps everyone out, so she has to pay more to get rid of the advertising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Probably not without changing the underlying response and tanking the benchmark ratings. Like I ask it to generate code, it tries to add a slogan reminder, now the comments on my code have Tide's slogan in them and the variables are all named "bleach".
Probably less humorous than that, but the underlying point stands. People will be extremely upset about their prompts being tinkered with, and any perceived degradation in quality will be quickly attributed to them. The hidden nature of them will probably cause speculation that they do the same on the higher tier plans.
It is quite interesting problem, because you could just respond with ok I want you to write whatever that library does. I don't want to pay for this.
If my business was a large CRUD app, like CRM I would be worried about smaller apps popping up on the market.
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.
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!
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.
Enshittification is inevitable.
Interesting how those two sentences are directly aligned. I hate ad culture.
Could be that based on your prompts it had just decided you were an adult, and started throwing ads at you.
Pay to see ads of products where you also pay to see ads :)
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.
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.