"Last month, OpenAI released that it would start running ads in ChatGPT. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, OpenAI's chief financial officer defended the introduction of ads inside ChatGPT, arguing that it is a way to "democratize access to artificial intelligence," and that this decision is aligned with its mission: "AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of humanity who can pay.""
"History offers a cautionary answer. The last several decades of online advertising has proven that when profit is decoupled from user value, incentives drift toward harvesting data and maximizing engagement-the variables that can be most easily measured and monetized. That trade-off shaped everything in the internet economy. As advertising scaled, so did the incentives it created. Attention became a scarce resource. Personal information became currency."
OpenAI announced plans to place ads inside ChatGPT and defended the move as a way to democratize access to artificial intelligence and align with an AGI mission. Anthropic responded with an ad arguing that advertising does not belong in systems trusted for advice, therapy, and decision-making. The core question is whether advertising is the only scalable funding model for AI and whether ad incentives will shape system optimization. Historical experience shows ad-funded models can decouple profit from user value, drive data harvesting and engagement-maximizing behavior, and bias results toward advertisers at the expense of quality.
Read at Fast Company
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