OpenAI to begin testing ads on ChatGPT in the U.S.

Overall reaction: enshittification and distrust

• Many see this as the “enshittification” moment for LLMs, analogous to when search engines shifted from relevance to ad optimization.
• Strong skepticism that ads can be added without degrading quality: assumption that over time, “most profitable tokens” will displace most relevant ones.
• Several predict a slippery slope: free tier → ads → ads on cheaper paid tiers → erosion of value across the board.

Influence on answers and training

• Users doubt OpenAI’s claim that “ChatGPT’s responses will not be influenced by ads,” citing Google’s evolution where ads shaped both ranking and UI.
• Some say they already see product answers biased toward OpenAI’s commercial partners and away from sites like Amazon.
• Concern that ad-related logic will eventually bleed into RL or pretraining, corrupting even paid, “unbiased” models.
• Worry that ad copy could get embedded in school work, legal filings, and other generated documents.

Privacy, tracking, and measurement

• Discomfort with ads inside intimate, one-on-one conversations that may be highly personal.
• Questions about how advertisers will verify delivery and performance: speculation about affiliate-style tracking parameters, cookies, or external tools that query ChatGPT and correlate revenue.

Moral and societal debate about advertising

• A large subthread argues that modern advertising is intrinsically manipulative, exploits cognitive “gaps” and familiarity effects, distorts markets, drives overconsumption and environmental harm, and enables large-scale political propaganda.
• Others defend advertising as:
  • Essential for informing people about products and enabling free/cheap services.
  • Complementary to user agency (people can still choose not to buy).
  • A key enabler of companies like Google and their public benefits.
• Disagreement centers on whether advertising is efficient or a massive systemic inefficiency and whether its harms outweigh its benefits.

Economics, inevitability, and alternatives

• Some frame ads as inevitable under capitalism: OpenAI must recover massive compute costs and compete for capital and talent.
• Others note users mostly tolerate ads elsewhere (Google, Threads), so large-scale backlash is unlikely; ads may even push OpenAI toward a trillion-dollar valuation.
• A few cancel subscriptions in protest, while others tout paid or enterprise alternatives (e.g., Gemini with stricter privacy).
• Several expect all major LLM vendors to adopt ads, potentially making ad-free, unbiased models rare.