ChatGPT ads are about to drop (old.reddit.com)

Reports indicate OpenAI is preparing to introduce ads into ChatGPT, likely targeting the free tier as a new monetization lever alongside paid subscriptions and enterprise products. If rolled out, ads could appear as promoted responses, suggested links, or inline content inside conversational threads—changing the core user experience and the business model that has driven rapid adoption. For the AI community this is significant because it shifts incentives: model behavior and UX choices may be shaped by revenue priorities, raising questions about trust, neutrality, and long-term alignment of conversational agents. Technically, embedding advertising into a generative chat system has nontrivial implications. Ad serving must integrate with retrieval or prompt-construction layers (RAG, context windows, and token-level conditioning), creating risks of sponsored content being prioritized over optimal or truthful responses. It requires realtime ad-selection infrastructure, telemetry for relevance scoring, and careful handling of user privacy and tracking. For ML teams, that means new A/B testing, reward-model adjustments, and safety filters to prevent manipulative or misleading sponsored outputs. The move will spur research and tooling around auditable ranking, prompt sanitization, and monetization-aware alignment techniques, while also prompting regulatory and ethics scrutiny about commercial influence in AI-mediated information.