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ChatGPT is getting ads. Sam Altman once called them a 'last resort.'
https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-ads-openai-2026-1Netflix famously backtracked on its stance toward ads. Now, OpenAI is following suit.
The AI pioneer announced that ads are coming to ChatGPT — less than two years after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman portrayed them as "a last resort."
"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me," Altman said during an event at Harvard University in May 2024. "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model."
Altman's softened stance since then underlines the massive change OpenAI has undergone in the last two years, and the company's embrace of advertising is a testament to just how expensive the AI race has become.
The AI pioneer announced that ads are coming to ChatGPT — less than two years after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman portrayed them as "a last resort."
"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me," Altman said during an event at Harvard University in May 2024. "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model."
Altman's softened stance since then underlines the massive change OpenAI has undergone in the last two years, and the company's embrace of advertising is a testament to just how expensive the AI race has become.
The process is called enshittification, coined by Cory Doctorow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
