As depressing as what I'm about to say is, it's a truth I've come to accept.
The world economy is built on poor people. You might be wondering what that has to do with ChatGPT, and I'll explain shortly.
But first, here's what's going on:
OpenAI announced on January 16 that ads will be rolling out in ChatGPT for users from the United States.
These ads will primarily be shown to free tier users and the lowest subscription tier called ChatGPT Go, which is reportedly $8 per month.
You can expect that almost everyone is losing their shit over this, or at least, they are pretending to be, because these days someone just has to make a lot of noise over everything.
And you want to know what's most funny about it?
X users seem to be the loudest about it, at least that I know of and it's funny because they are literally posting on a platform with AI integrated, where there are ads and the model is primarily trained on user data on the platform.
So when these people talk about privacy concerns or data concerns, it's comical since they already give up so much for another company within the same industry.
But it's OpenAI, every industry needs a villain right?
Ads in Generative AI Chatbots is not surprising
The reason I said that the world economy is built on poor people is that they always bear the greater cost of service and production.
Ads exist because everyone cannot afford to pay to not see them.
And businesses capitalize on that.
This inability to afford subscriptions to block ads makes it cheaper for businesses to market their goods and services.
This is because they place more value on action than publicity, generally.
A company's ad costs go up most when users viewing the ads actually take action, in which cases, the business is making money.
You browse through social platforms daily and all you see is people asking for free things.
Every AI content I view has hundreds of people asking if the tools are free and they want the level of quality and value that paying users get.
Expecting that AI companies will not turn to ads is wishful thinking because they have a population of people wanting to use their services for free and the only way to monetize and be sustainable is to sell ad space.
Certainly, most AI apps that are niche will likely never have to turn to ads because they are niche and can afford to be profitable because they'd be less of the general population wanting to use their service for free.
But when it comes to apps like ChatGPT or Gemini, ads will be important because this is a mass consumer product and the vast majority are poor!
Whether or not these companies will sell users sensitive data really doesn't matter because ads will always be needed!
Even brave browser which is designed specifically to block ads have an ad business, of course in their case they ask nicely and tell you they'd not harvest sensitive information and they might even give you some crypto coins, but all of that is to distract you from the fact that they have to have an ad business too.
Ads will always be a necessary piece of the business world because the masses are poor and businesses thrive within that economic environment.