We all know that if a company provides a service for free, then it's being funded through things such as affiliate marketing, shopping links, or data scraping. The most common method is, of course, advertising, and it's absolutely everywhere, though there's one sector that's yet to be really hit by it, and that's AI. But if the thoughts of OpenAI's CEO are anything to go by, it won't be long before you'll see them in chatbots.
The CEO in question is Sam Altman, and he's certainly never been one to shy away from expressing his views on everything AI. Now we get to hear more of his thoughts in the first episode of OpenAI's podcast, where over 40 minutes, topics such as the future of ChatGPT and artificial general intelligence are chewed over with the show's host, Andrew Mayne.
Much of the discussion doesn't broach anything we've not already heard about, but when Mayne asks Altman about the possibility of ChatGPT serving ads in its stream of hallucinated gibberish, the OpenAI boss is pretty open about it all.
"We haven't done any advertising product yet. I kind of...I mean, I'm not totally against it. I can point to areas where I like ads. I think ads on Instagram, kinda cool. I bought a bunch of stuff from them. But I am, like, I think it'd be very hard to…I mean, take a lot of care to get right."
On the point about getting ads in ChatGPT right, Altman explains it's a matter of trust. "People have a very high degree of trust in ChatGPT, which is interesting because AI hallucinates. It should be the tech that you don't trust that much."
Wait, what? Did the boss of ChatGPT just say that one shouldn't trust it? Yes, yes he did. To be fair to Altman, hallucinations in LLMs (large language models) is something that is inherent to the technology and although one can do all kinds of things to either minimise the amount of false information they churn out or catch it early and prevent it from being issued, ultimately ChatGPT will always have a hallucination problem.
I can't imagine any company would be happy to pay OpenAI to insert their adverts into ChatGPT for them to come out all wonky donkey, so it's perhaps not just a matter of the users' trust, but that of potential advertisers, too.
Given just how much money OpenAI burns through to pay for all its massive AI servers and continual research, it's surely only a matter of time before ads start to appear in ChatGPT. I should imagine that they'll initially just take the form of a break in the flow of text, with a link to click on or a short video to watch, rather than being generated by the AI itself.
But with generative AI seeping into every aspect of today's world of business, I wouldn't be too surprised if we do see the odd generated ad popping here and there, even if it's only in the form of an experimental ad. Because if Altman thinks Instagram ads are cool, then you just know it's a given.
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