I disagree with Ed Zitron on a lot but I think this is spot on, with a real risk that OpenAI will enshittify their consumer-facing product before they even really get it working in a way that has broad appeal:
OpenAI is reportedly looking at ads as a means to narrow the gap between its revenues and losses. As I pointed out in Burst Damage, introducing an advertising revenue stream would require significant upfront investment, both in terms of technology and talent. OpenAI would need a way to target ads, and a team to sell advertising — or, instead, use a third-party ad network that would take a significant bite out of its revenue.
It’s unclear how much OpenAI could charge advertisers, or what percentage of its reported 200 million weekly users have an ad-blocker installed. Or, for that matter, whether ads would provide a perverse incentive for OpenAI to enshittify an already unreliable product.
Facebook and Google — as I’ve previously noted — have made their products manifestly worse in order to increase the amount of time people spend on their sites, and thus, the number of ads they see. In the case of Facebook, it buried your newsfeed under a deluge of AI-generated sludge and “recommended content.” Google, meanwhile, has progressively degraded the quality of its search results in order to increase the volume of queries it received as a means of making sure users saw more ads.
OpenAI could, just as easily, fall into the same temptation. Most people who use ChatGPT are trying to accomplish a specific task — like writing a term paper, or researching a topic, or whatever — and then they leave. And so, the amount of ads they’d conceivably see each will undoubtedly be comparatively low compared to a social network or search engine. Would OpenAI try to get users to stick around longer — to write more prompts — by crippling the performance of its models?
https://www.wheresyoured.at/godot-isnt-making-it/
Mark Carrigan 