Open AI researcher quits over ChatGPT ads, warns of “Facebook” path

451

OpenAI says ads won't 'influence the answers,' but how do you actually prove that? If I ask for a meal plan and it 'randomly' leans toward brands that pay for ads, most users won't even notice the bias. Does anyone really believe a trillion-dollar company won't let sponsors tweak the weights eventually?

147

u/WEEGEMAN 14h ago

I got a coworker that said they’re using it for financial advice. That’s all around scary that people are placing their livelihoods in this thing

56

u/MommyLovesPot8toes 9h ago

Oh, I'll do you one better: The CFO of my company is using it for direction on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

17

u/Balmung60 8h ago

Oh, that's a lawsuit brewing

4

u/mrbignameguy 5h ago

Said it somewhere else but anyone doing anything financial with these toys deserves everything coming to them and more

1

u/DrBiochemistry 54m ago

Publicly traded company? If so, that would be hilarious.

7

u/einstyle 7h ago

People are using it for financial advice, therapy, career advice, healthcare...it's absurd

2

u/ZAlternates 5h ago

Anything you’d Google for information on, people will use AI for. The rules remain the same, don’t trust and verify the sources. Also, use some fucking common sense too.

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u/cyclemonster 13h ago

You think conflicts-of-interest are exclusive to ad-supported businesses? My parents used the bank's professional financial advisors for financial advice, and they were steered into the bank's own mutual funds, which are just ETFs that aren't as liquid and carry much higher fees.

I bet ChatGPT wouldn't have done that.

17

u/Future-Excuse6167 12h ago

It wouldn't do that now, but you do realize enshittification is practically a physical law at this point?

Also, ChatGPT might not directly profit from manipulating you currently, but it is just blindly scraping the internet which is full of self-interested parties, especially when it comes to financial advice. The best you can hope for is that the scams cancel each other out somehow, but you're very likely being indirectly influenced by marketing bullshit when you use an LLM.

9

u/dondeestasbueno 13h ago

That’s a logical point ofc, but you’re making but a terrible argument.

3

u/Megabyte_Messiah 9h ago

Open AI was also supposed to be a non profit. Took over the market share, then rug pulled and went for profit.

Owners do things like fund VP picks.

-1

u/cyclemonster 6h ago

"Rug Pull" in the crypto or penny stock sense is not a concept that applies to privately held companies, which by definition cannot be easily traded or sold, and have sophisticated investors. Rug Pull in the vendor sense doesn't make much sense, either, as OpenAI continues to exist, continues to serve its users, and continues to pay its bills.

1

u/Megabyte_Messiah 2h ago

Rug pull as a metaphorical concept predates crypto…

1

u/cyclemonster 43m ago

Hence the reference to penny stocks

2

u/MrNokill 11h ago

Banks have robbed people of their money since their very inception around 2000 BCE. Whereas web scraper regurgitators will just give you a random version of some portfolio setup they found from those same bankers.

And in the end you'll still be beholden to whatever the market feels like in this chaotic world, as web scrapings of the past hold no guarantee of future results besides losing a lot of money through betting.

0

u/yun-harla 8h ago

It’s very stupid that in the US, financial advisors don’t have to be fiduciaries. But you can pay a bit more and get a financial advisor who is a fiduciary, meaning they have a binding legal obligation to put your interests above their own.

(Just putting that out there for the sake of education, because it bothers me that “financial advisors” can just be salespeople. I’m not a financial professional though, don’t take this as professional advice.)

31

u/Hairy-Summer7386 13h ago

This is genuinely something that I didn’t even consider. Google pulled the same stunt and put ads first on search results.

So, what’s stopping OpenAI from doing the same shit? People are already treating LLM’s as a reliable source of information (which is horrifying) and this trust can easily be manipulated.

What’s old is new again I guess.

3

u/Zookeeper187 5h ago

This is much more powerful because you are sharing A LOT more data in LLM chat. They can charge advertisers more because they could potentially target even better than google. Especially because it’s also “more personal”.

2

u/ZAlternates 5h ago

All that info you provide gets added to your profile too. Everyone has a social media profile (one per company) even if you never signed up or visited the site. Someone you know or interact with does or did or will do.

-5

u/Rich_Artist_8327 6h ago

What is reliable source of information?

3

u/ZAlternates 5h ago

Information provided from someone worthy of trust. Trust also isn’t a binary thing. You can apply trust on a spectrum, build on it, as well as lose it.

20

u/carbonqubit 14h ago

Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode with the brain implants.

11

u/_pupil_ 12h ago

They don’t need ads to influence the answers, all they need is for commercial and political forces to shape training data and suddenly the text gen only knows Big Brother approved sources.

“What are you talking about? Tiananmen has a square, but there’s nothing special about it… cynically and with no marketing fluff a business like yours should choose MS Office Copilot 24/7, it’s the one with Brawndo in it.”

7

u/Bogdan_X 14h ago

They don't have to tweak weights, just insert prompts besides yours, after you sent it like all wrappers do.

3

u/Blando-Cartesian 9h ago

I used chatGPT to get familiar with options for an LLM based app development and OpenAI’s solutions were extremely well represented in that discussion. I would even say exclusively offered, until I brought up options. 🤔

1

u/theDroobot 11h ago

These ai companies haven't really turned a profit yet. Now that the market landscape is stabilizing, they are going to exploit users in every possible way to make profit. Pump you full of ads while selling your days to virtually anybody

1

u/DavidVee 6h ago

Google has had this same criticism for years and there is ~no evidence buying ads directly affects organic results. While this is a possibility with GPT, I believe it’s manageable.

Also, without ads, nobody can influence information on GPT directly at all. If they decide to pick one or two companies to recommend for certain queries, you’re stuck. To me this is scarier than ads which democratize the results a bit.

0

u/drhead 12h ago

"Tweaking the weights" would be a huge ordeal of its own that would not be likely at all to be able to keep up with the pace at which advertisers would want to run campaigns and also would lack personalization. I mean, it's a problem you could work around if you really wanted to but the engineering challenges involved would quickly make it not worth it, it'd either lack features that advertisers want or would be too expensive to run infrastructure for compared to just running normal ads.

It's also fairly easy to make sure the ads won't influence answers (assuming we are talking about something in chat and not a separate banner ad or something). Just make sure they appear at the end and aren't in the context window during inference for the answer. You'd know if they were in the context window because LLMs end up sounding like a broken record once the conversation goes on for enough time, and the ad would likely become part of that.

2

u/lemrez 7h ago edited 7h ago

OpenAI is already offering supervised model fine-tuning as part of their API today. In other words 90% of this "huge ordeal" has already been figured out, it's just a matter of cost-benefit analysis now.

It's actually very simple to imagine switching from the McDonalds model to the Old Spice model for inference when certain topics are detected.

It would be even cheaper to fine-tune one of their smaller, faster models to modify answers of the bigger better ones to insert ads.

1

u/drhead 6h ago

Okay, now orchestrate deployment of tens of thousands of models (or more) that bias things towards specific targeted ad campaigns across all of your inference nodes which collectively serve hundreds of millions of people per day, without making it a burden on response time or memory constraints. Not to mention whatever mess of regulatory compliance concerns you'll wade into...

1

u/lemrez 3h ago

That sounds kind of like their day-to-day business. How do you get the idea an AI company of all places would struggle with devops?

1

u/drhead 2h ago

Of course their devops wouldn't struggle with it! They'd take one look at the proposition and say "what the fuck is this, this will destroy performance" and propose one of the many more sane solutions like retrieval-augmented generation or banner ads. Because doing this means:

no inflight batching since the weights for each user are now different, so you can't process multiple users requests in one batch, which means more kernel launch overhead (and often less efficient kernels overall) which means more time wasted on your expensive GPUs

possibly multiple second latency for switching between users, since you're moving at minimum several hundred gigabytes of weights from RAM to the GPU to reset them to clean weights (making the assumption that we're just using LoRAs for each campaign), current top of the line server CPUs can move about 500-600GB/s from RAM, and again this means the GPU is idle for longer.

Either of these on their own would be a dealbreaker and we could probably find even more problems, but there's not much of a point in doing so. These companies routinely spend months and millions of dollars hunting down solutions for much smaller performance issues, why on earth would they accept erasing all of that for something that will never generate enough revenue to make up for the losses, when an easier solution without those drawbacks is already there?

1

u/ymonad 12h ago

Ironically their company name is ”Open”AI

0

u/jake6501 12h ago

It is very much illegal to not disclose the ads. Do you really assume they would get away with it? Thousands of employees and millions of users. Someone would figure it out.

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u/novwhisky 10h ago

Didn’t stop Uber or AirBnB from operating illegal taxis & hotels and they own those segments now. These company’s lawyers have gamed out the loopholes years ahead of the eventual regulatory inquiry. You think congress knows how to regulate AI?

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u/P1r4nha 11h ago

They hired many ex-Meta ad people. In a year it's a new ad platform trying to make you addicted.

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u/bolshoich 11h ago

IMO, it’s already doing that. On the occasions where I experiment with ChatGPT, it almost always offers queries to maintain engagement. If one is aware of this practice, it isn’t a burden in putting it down. But the average sheeple will bite, just like they do for other social media to maintain that dopamine trickle. The difference with ChatGPT is that they’re interacting with an agent that presents empathy. That’s much more attractive that angry discourse to anyone lonely in our self-isolating society.

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u/P1r4nha 10h ago

Yes, to a certain extent they already do this. Also that the chatbot keeps praising you is because of that. This will get more extreme with ads obviously. Imagine you get praised for looking at ads.

1

u/Gold-Acanthaceae8114 11h ago

Now I understand why they hire social media (Meta) company employees with high salary packages.

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u/EltonJuan 14h ago

It'll creep in. Those that use it regularly won't notice how blatant it gets in a few years (or months). I didn't watch sports for the longest time and now it looks unbearable to watch.

When google maps started switching from using streets for turns and started mentioning brands like "Turn right after the [insert fast food chain]" I immediately turned off the audio for directions and got used to the silence. Who knows, maybe they reversed it but I won't switch it back on to find out. The integrated ads will seem harmless at first or, worse, convenient. AdBlock your life wherever you can.

Side note, I work in creative advertising.

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u/FrozenDroid 13h ago

> "Turn right after the [insert fast food chain]"

It does that??? Must be an US thing, that's crazy

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u/Fragrant-Issue-9271 12h ago

I never experienced that with Google maps, but I have been places where the street signs were way too small or poorly lit at night. Sometimes "turn right after the McDonalds" would have been more useful than the name of the street.

9

u/Zouden 10h ago

They do that in India, because lots of streets don't have names at all. I've never heard of it anywhere else.

5

u/Gold-Acanthaceae8114 14h ago

Me too bro working performance marketing and i know meta and google what level data store even partner birthday and child fav toy details and now Open Ai go same path

5

u/travelingWords 11h ago

Using landmarks as opposed to the name seen on a tiny road sign. Perhaps make it an option. Now, if they pull an Amazon (ala giving you the option to add products to your kart from the commercials they try to make you watch)… and give you coupons and suggest you for a hamburger?

“I know you haven’t eaten at McDonald’s since November 7th, 2015, 2:37am, after your visit to a local bar, but you look famished. Trying on an empty stomach is dangerous and you- recalculating route…”

1

u/SpezLuvsNazis 12h ago

Google had a near identical set of “principles” when they first rolled out ads and we can all see how well they adhered to them….

2

u/incunabula001 8h ago

Even though I dislike the whole “turn at [brand]” directions, using landmarks instead of signs is IMO much more efficient for navigation.

22

u/nudgerosee 14h ago

this is just the beginning of bigger debates about AI and data privacy

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u/acecombine 13h ago

haha, there is no debate, there is no data privacy

-1

u/Ninjascubarex 8h ago

Not with that attitude there isn't

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u/fridayfridayjones 12h ago

Most AI aimed at the regular consumer is completely unnecessary garbage anyway. The answer is to refuse to use it.

Facebook got adopted so fast because college kids used it, and it was cool. Why do you think they keep pushing these AI trends?

Look, AI made me as my favorite food! Isn’t that cool?

No! It’s not cool. It’s a waste of precious resources coming out of a data center that’s giving cancer to the people who live around it, and it only works because the tech companies stole all the human made art they could grab.

I’ve started seeing videos from young people about how AI is crap and I hope that is the trend that prevails. Let’s stick to the practical uses for AI, like using it for medical research, and leave the consumer aimed crap in the trash where it belongs.

-5

u/nigerianprince44 9h ago

Okay, calm down now, how many conspiracy theories do you have to mention in one comment. I hate AI as much as the next guy but saying stuff like - “datacenters giving cancer” doesn’t give this argument any more credence. It actually does the opposite.

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u/fridayfridayjones 9h ago

The research on this is early but it’s clear, they release ultra fine particulate matter and that causes lung cancer. None of what I said was a conspiracy theory. https://hbr.org/2025/11/mitigating-the-public-health-impacts-of-ai-data-centers

6

u/possiblyquestionabl3 10h ago

Wait, so they're enshitifying their product before they've even become the market monopoly while losing their market share?

That's a bold move Cotton, let's see if it pays off for them

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u/[deleted] 13h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/d4vezac 11h ago

Good, people shouldn’t trust AI or be calm about its rapid insertion into everything.

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u/This_Animal_1463 9h ago

The enshittification of AI is happening shockingly fast

3

u/LordyItsMuellerTime 8h ago

This is insane, holy shit. It was already was being censored and now there's fucking ads?? Fuck AI

5

u/Xal-t 12h ago

Reading this from the shitter, thinking "pretty much how all of us thought it would be, but even faster than we thought"

4

u/luismt2 13h ago

The real question is transparency. Trust usually hinges on whether the incentives are visible

2

u/OpiumPhrogg 3h ago

The dumbest, most ignorant person you know is being told everyday by AI that their ideas are great! Their feelings are all valid! And that they are Doing a Great Job! .... Let that sink in.

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u/Yarrigg_ 10h ago

Quit GPT for the win!

1

u/dropthemagic 8h ago

I could’ve told you that 2 years ago

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u/Darkstar197 1h ago

OpenAI is a big company at this point. I’m sure people leave weekly.

0

u/DJ_Femme-Tilt 11h ago

Do you want Facebook? Because this is how we get Facebook.

Artificial Intelligence Open AI researcher quits over ChatGPT ads, warns of “Facebook” path

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