[m4ck_]

>Mission alignment: Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible.

Advertising and marketing kills humanity, these should be among the first industries that AI eliminates; kinda getting mixed messages here. You'd think the tech that supposedly is going to make money and all work irrelevant could figure out a way to make money without resorting to being yet another mechanism to deliver ads.

[simianwords]

> Advertising and marketing kills humanity

No it doesn't. Please stope the hyperbole. Its literally just advertisements and people have the agency to choose to buy products.

[alembic_fumes]

I invite you to ponder the question: would a worldwide ban of all advertising have a greater or smaller impact on environment-destroying activity than banning of all air travel?

I would argue for "greater", and from that it rather naturally follows that advertisement and marketing indeed kills humanity.

[piva00]

There's agency but it's being manipulated by psychological tricks since the advent of the whole PR industry. That's how it was born, Edward Bernays discovered he could use techniques borrowed from his uncle Sigmund Freud to manipulate people to buy stuff.

Given this trickery I wouldn't say that people have absolute complete agency, they are being exploited, even more the ones that are more affected by trick A or B. I do agree it should be more nuanced than "it's killing humanity" but at the same time I believe you should meet more in the middle that there are manipulative tactics used by the whole PR industry that are exploitative, and do affect people's agency.

[robotpepi]

People have the agency to not consume drugs. The point is, marketing is completely absurd, it's an immense inefficiency of the system.

[imiric]

Spoken like a true advertiser.

The reality is that psychologically manipulating people into buying things by forcing yourself as a middleman into every business transaction and industry on the planet is not just morally despicable, but opportunistic, exploitative, and many other negative descriptors I can't quite put into words.

But this isn't even the truly insidious and harmful part. That is reserved for the fact that the same systems used to get people to consume, are also used to manipulate them into thinking and acting in ways that someone, somewhere, could potentially benefit from. So anyone with a negligible amount of resources and effort has the ability to influence individuals, groups of people, societies, and entire countries, to buy into their agenda by pushing their propaganda. After all, modern advertising uses the same propaganda tactics pioneered by the likes of E. Bernays a century ago.

It should be clear to any sane adult that this psychological manipulation is directly responsible for the corruption of democratic processes and sociopolitical instability we've seen around the world for the past decade+.

And then, if all this wasn't enough, these advertising leeches are doing this by violating digital rights, abusing our privacy, corrupting every entertainment experience, and utilizing every nasty trick they can legally get away with to steal our data, and get rich from it via dark data broker markets in perpetuity.

So, please, spare me the bullshit excuse that this is "just" advertising, and that it's a public good that helps poor small businesses reach customers. Catalogs and contextual advertising have existed for decades, but that wasn't enough for these greedy bastards. Humanity is objectively far worse off because of this, and the adtech industry has played a huge role in making it happen. Everyone who has worked on this tech should be ashamed of themselves, even though I'm sure they don't think twice about it, and enjoy the sight of their bank account statements.

[m4ck_]

To be clear, I'm not saying that advertising under whatever slop chatgpt outputs is killing humanity, I'm more thinking of the industry as a whole. They use lies and deception to influence behavior and push products; even if they're fully aware that the claims they're making are blatant lies and the products are harmful. If that industry disappeared humanity would be better off for it.

and to be fair the industry doesn't need to be banned, just heavily regulated, fully transparent, and there should be exponential consequences for their lies (such as, claiming cigarettes are healthy while knowing they're addictive and cause cancer; anyone involved in decisions like that should be in Angola growing tobacco for 13 cents an hour.)

[miltonlost]

"just" advertisements when ChatGPT is designed to be sycophantic and manipulative

[Aerbil313]

Not really. Advertising results in extreme market inefficiencies through the game theory playing out (if you don't advertise as a company, you lose out to companies that do). It's the massive sink of the modern economy, there's nearly no sector unaffected by it. If advertising was banned (not that it's very easy) vast majority of issues associated with capitalism wouldn't even exist and everybody would be wealthier.

The similarity between advertising and cancer are striking, see the post Advertising is a cancer on society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142

This is all putting aside the fact that %99.9 of all advertising works by exploiting the familiarity circuit in the human brain. The effects of advertising are, by definition, not voluntary. See Ads just work, no matter what you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399633

If the purpose of %99.9 of advertising was not exploiting the familiarity circuit and was instead to make you aware of a product you didn't know about before, there wouldn't be a single ad of Coca-Cola, since everybody on the planet knows about it already.

Also, my mom literally buys whatever she sees playing on YouTube ads that week. I know because I see those ads too. You'd be surprised how many people are going through life with undiagnosed or untreated ADHD and how many further lack cognitive agency.

[xyzzy123]

It does feel like ensh*ttification. I can't imagine how many school essays and law filings and papers these ads are going to end up embedded in.

But the most charitable view is that even AGI needs cost recovery. Ads are the way you do this for people who aren't willing or able to pay with money.

For better or worse, OpenAI exists in the context of a capitalist system. It has to be competitive in that arena to attract and retain investment, staff, etc. Revenue always ends up being part of the "mission".

[boelboel]

The biggest problem with ads is that even if I were willing to pay any amount of money I would still get many of the problems brought by this 'ad run' world. There's enough things where you can't even avoid ads.

[henryfjordan]

Advertisement serves an important purpose. If you were a farmer with a mule and the tractor salesman came by for the first time, that would be life-changing for you. You wouldn't say that salesman was evil for advertising his tractor.

[m4ck_]

Fair enough, there is some utility to it. But we're quite along way from traveling salesmen advertising tractors. Maybe it doesn't need to be eliminated, just heavily regulated.

What if the salesman said knowingly lied about his tractors? or poisoned the farmer's mules to influence him towards buying one? That'd be on the scale of evil, right?

[imiric]

> kinda getting mixed messages here

Did you really expect a corporation to be transparent and consistent with their messaging? It should be obvious by now that the word "open" in their name is pure marketing.

I'm surprised it took them this long to jump on the advertising money train. I wouldn't be surprised if they were already monetizing this in the background, and only decided to make it public now.

[GenerWork]

If they can’t advertise, then how should they make a profit/hit break even?