On Monday, 800 million ChatGPT users got a new feature. Ads.
Not the banner kind. Not the pop-up kind. These sit below the chatbot's responses, personalized by default using data from users' current conversations and past chat threads. If you asked ChatGPT about your divorce last Tuesday, an algorithm now decides what to sell you this Wednesday. OpenAI says advertisers won't see the actual conversations. OpenAI says ads won't influence the model's answers. OpenAI promises the system will skip sensitive topics like health and politics. For now, those promises are held together by a blog post and good intentions.
What the company has been quieter about is the other thing that happened this week. The people who were supposed to enforce those promises? They're gone.
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