AI Is Going to Revolutionize Advertising in the Worst Imaginable Way
That’s why we ought to treat OpenAI’s claims about its advertising with the same skepticism applied to the advertising itself. Sure, the company says it will insulate the ads as ostensibly independent from content. “Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled,” the company insists. “We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.” But that leaves a lot of marketing money on the table—and from the outside, it sure looks like OpenAI needs that money to stay afloat.
Hence, the Super Bowl ad diss from OpenAI competitor Anthropic, the maker of Claude, whose commercial mocked the sponsored content that will inevitably intrude and inundate ChatGPT feeds. But mount that high horse at your peril, Anthropic. Unless there’s a clever way to pay for all those server farms and microchips, all other AI platforms will probably have to follow suit. (And if the Pentagon cuts ties with Anthropic, as it’s threatening to do, that day may come even sooner.)
The history of social media foretells it: Platforms and their creators, once unspoiled by corporate backers, now pitch us relentlessly—and in increasingly devious ways. “Native” ads on Instagram and TikTok often look indistinguishable within the content, forming the basis of the $30 billion influencer industry. But the notion of placing an energy drink in the background of an influencer’s video will soon seem laughably conspicuous. By that point, the problem for ChatGPT users will no longer be that they notice and get annoyed with ads. The problem—and the real money to be made by OpenAI—will be when they don’t.