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Beneath ChatGPT’s charming personality lies a gold mine for advertisers: an AI chatbot that never gets tired of selling customers goods.
New reporting by Information Some recent topics of conversation among OpenAI employees have been revealed as they work to supply new audiences for advertisers to manipulate.
The plans are far from final, although they do give us a glimpse of what may soon become the norm for ChatGPT. For example, one conversation among OpenAI employees involved giving sponsored chatbot results “preferential treatment” compared to non-sponsored results, anonymous employees reported. Information
It may appear that a user asking how much ibuprofen to take for a headache receives a promoted ad for Advil in response to a chatbot. Meanwhile, actual results at the right dosage may be pushed to the side, or buried under a mountain of advertising text (just think about how many). Sponsored Search Results Nowadays during a normal Google search you have to scroll and move forward.)
Given that ChatGPT has a self-reported audience of 900 million weekly users, it is difficult to imagine the consequences of such a setup. OpenAI is not numb to the negative sentiment that sponsored results are likely to stir.
Information The report said other internal conversations have focused on the best ways to serve ads without completely annoying users, who may feel less inclined to chat for hours if they feel like corporate advertisers are looking like a third wheel. In an ad mockup shared with the publication, ads only appear after the second prompt with ChatGPT, to avoid bombarding users with sponsored content. Very early in their conversation.
News broke in early December that OpenAI was experimenting with populating ads in Chatbots, when a software spy uncovered a dozen lines of code referencing things like “feature ads” and “search ads carousel” in the chatbot’s beta app for Android.
“As ChatGPT becomes more capable and more widely used, we’re looking at ways to provide more intelligence to everyone,” an OpenAI spokesperson explained. Information“As part of this, we’re exploring how ads for our product might look, People have a trusting relationship with ChatGPT, and any approach will be designed to respect that trust,”
When the ChatGPT Adapocalypse actually comes to pass remains to be seen, but despite so much money being spent on the effort, it would be surprising if it did not succeed.
More information on ChatGPT: Millions of private ChatGPAT conversations are being harvested and sold for profit
