Ads Ruined Social Media. Now They're Coming to AI

Chatbots are pivoting to the ad model and optimizing for eyeballs, just like social media did. Remember how that turned out?

- Parmy Olson

Chatbots might hallucinate and sprinkle too much flattery on their users - "That's a fascinating question!" one told me - but at least the subscription model that underpins them is healthy for our well-being. Many Americans pay about US$20 (S$26) a month to use the premium versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini Pro or Anthropic's Claude, and the result is that the products are designed to provide maximum utility.

Don't expect this status quo to last. Subscription revenue has a limit, and Anthropic's new US$200-a-month "Max" tier suggests even the most popular models are under pressure to find new revenue streams.

Unfortunately, the most obvious one is advertising - the web's most successful business model. Artificial intelligence (AI) builders are already exploring ways to plug more ads into their products, and while that's good for their bottom lines, it also means we're about to see a new chapter in the attention economy that fueled the internet.

If social media's descent into engagement-bait is any guide, the consequences will be profound.

One cost is addiction.

Young office workers are becoming dependent on AI tools to help them write e-mails and digest long documents, according to a recent study, and OpenAI says a cohort of "problematic" ChatGPT users are hooked on the tool. Putting ads into ChatGPT, which now has more than 500 million active users, won't spur the company to help those people reduce their use of the product. Quite the opposite.