On Friday, January 16, OpenAI announced a number of updates that would be coming to its ChatGPT chatbot. In addition to launching ChatGPT Go, its $8-priced subscription tier, worldwide, ChatGPT will also eventually be testing out advertising for its free and Go tiers in the United States in the coming weeks.

According to OpenAI, the move to add advertising to ChatGPT is “so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay.”

What might users expect from a ChatGPT with advertisements? We can examine the fine print by reading the company’s announcement, but we can also discuss how it might play out in the long run.

What ChatGPT with ads is promising

OpenAI’s announcement for the eventual introduction of ads to ChatGPT comes with its own mission statement, which feels admirable, if a little off-putting.

Said OpenAI, “Our mission is to ensure AGI (artificial general intelligence) benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible.”

It added that it’s aiming for the long-term value of ChatGPT, with the priority being “user trust and user experience over revenue.” This, despite seeking to put ads into its free and low-cost subscription tiers.

According to their announcement, advertising on ChatGPT will also be separated from the actual answers it gives users, and will thus not influence ChatGPT’s responses. Said OpenAI, “Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you.”

The idea is to show ads after your answers, and, if you’re curious enough, you can ask the ChatGPT interface to tell you more about the advertisement presented.

That said, ChatGPT conversations are also said to be “private from advertisers.” Further, OpenAI promises to “never sell your data to advertisers.”

Users will also have control over their data and the ability to turn off personalization and clear the data users from ads when they want to. OpenAI went on to say the quiet part out loud: “We’ll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that’s ad-free,” which can ostensibly be read as, “Subscribe to our higher-tiered service so you can use it without dealing with everything we’ve just written down in this announcement post!”

Enshittification, stage two?

As OpenAI seeks to make money from its artificial intelligence venture, users may have to reckon with actions similar to this moving forward. This is enshittification — the process by which a service or online platform degrades in quality — as it happens.

As Cory Doctorow’s process of enshittification might indicate, we are presumably hovering between its first and second phases, where, after attracting a user base, a given platform will start degrading the user experience to favor business customers.

The introduction of ads is a potential starting point of this second stage of enshittification. Reducing the feature set of a product for users who were previously used to getting everything for free is another indicator of this second stage.

One example of such enshittification that might be relevant to this case would be how Google’s search engine degraded over time. After garnering a large user base (Stage 1) by offering relevant search results and very limited advertising, the site degraded after increasing advertising, enabling search engine optimization and, in some cases, fraud to the advantage of advertising customers (Stage 2).

Stage 3 is when when a company abuses its business customers as it seeks value for shareholders of that company. In Google’s case, it might be argued that its work on inserting AI itself into search is its third stage.

The inevitable?

We must remember that OpenAI, for all its bells and whistles, is a loss-maker.

Fortune, citing HSBC Global Investment Research, projects OpenAI will still not be profitable by 2030, while its user base is estimated to grow to some 44% of the world’s adult population. Adding to this is the need for more cash and resources: at least another estimated $207 billion of computing power to maintain growth plans relative to current realities.

AI needs a lot of money to build infrastructure to support itself, and in a competitive market, there’s only so much to go around. Unfortunately, the introduction of advertising into artificial intelligence chatbots seemed like an all-too-common inevitability, especially given technological history.

How might this play out in the long run? It stands to reason that the advertising gambit is the start of OpenAI’s attempts to earn itself more money for sustenance.

If it fails, then OpenAI may very well fall. If it succeeds, then we may expect a degradation in quality — or perhaps the outright removal — of the free tier of service for ChatGPT once its userbase reaches a critical mass that can’t be ignored (and that won’t want to leave the service). – Rappler.com