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I know it's a joke, but the ads will surely be much more stealthy than that. Advertisers are gonna want to drive people to products and websites without it being clear it's actually an ad, like subtle ranking things differently, or trying to nudge users into some direction.

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Economically, I don't think that makes sense. Having a call to action that is just clicking a link is much more likely to be taken than a subtle suggestion. The former will be able to make more sales from the same ad spend which will allow them to bid higher on ads, out competing subtle ads.

Right. Advertisers will still want attribution for their ads. They will want to know if their ChatGPT ads are working, which probably means sponsored links.

Well, product placement in movies is also hard to track and also very popular.

Billboards, TV ads, sponsored events, collaborations, public events, etc. The list goes on. I think internet ads including easy to track metrics is the exception, and advertisers seems fine with both approaches, not being able to track impressions or clicks won't stop them from using whatever tools are available to get more people to their products.

(smart) advertising customers will want to see metrics and reporting on how their ad campaigns are doing, and making ads that are too subtle runs the risk that the customer is being charged for a weakly or sneakily worded message that they perhaps don't like. Also curious how they're gonna generate reliable, deterministic reporting for crafty embedded ads when LLMs are famously non-deterministic.

> advertising customers will want to see metrics and reporting

You're assuming the customers who want to advertise on ChatGPT will want it to look like the typical low quality internet ads, not like billboards or "company branding marketing", something I think is much more likely.

Instead of selling impressions/clicks, they'll sell "injections" that hopefully (from their PoV) at least has some impact, like a billboard or TV ad today.

LLM providers know a lot about their customers. I expect that, with their post-privacy approach, they will not have qualms about scanning a customers’ future chats for mentions of the advertised product (oh, the analysis potential!).

Luckily we have made plenty of advertising laws in the pre-AI era ensuring that things have to be disclosed quite clearly.

However I'd still bet that OpenAI is gonna be hit with a multi-billion dollar fine from the EU within 5 years of rolling out this feature. And they will pay and move along. Just how big tech works these days.

I did not think this type of “native advertising” was legal. As far as I know even in the USA ads have to be marked as such.

(that said, big companies have proven to be very effective in disregarding laws anyway)

yikes.

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