OpenAI recently revealed that we will soon see ads in ChatGPT conversations, and Anthropic is having some fun with this. It will reportedly run an ad during Sunday’s Super Bowl (below) in which ChatGPT isn’t named but is very clearly the target …
Ads in ChatGPT
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once said that embedding ads into ChatGPT conversations would be “a last resort,” but more recently confirmed that they are in fact on the way – though will not appear in Siri queries which fallback to ChatGPT.
Anthropic says no ads in Claude
Anthropic has announced today that it will not embed ads in conversations with Claude.
Including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking. We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests. So we’ve made a choice: Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won’t see “sponsored” links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude’s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.
The company says there are several dangers with including ads in chatbot conversations, including potential bias and incentivizing chatbots to keep users in conversations for longer periods.
Consider a concrete example. A user mentions they’re having trouble sleeping. An assistant without advertising incentives would explore the various potential causes—stress, environment, habits, and so on—based on what might be most insightful to the user. An ad-supported assistant has an additional consideration: whether the conversation presents an opportunity to make a transaction […]
Such ads would also introduce an incentive to optimize for engagement—for the amount of time people spend using Claude and how often they return. These metrics aren’t necessarily aligned with being genuinely helpful. The most useful AI interaction might be a short one, or one that resolves the user’s request without prompting further conversation.
Super Bowl ad
The company has today posted a one-minute video to its YouTube channel poking fun at the idea of ads in chatbots. The Wall Street Journal reports that a 30-second version of this ad will be run during Sunday’s Super Bowl.
Its big-game commercial parodies the prospect of intrusive advertising in AI conversations. The 30-second spot features a young man in a park attempting pull-ups, who asks a muscular bystander about achieving six-pack abs. The man starts with a detailed, if somewhat robotic response—like users might get from an AI chatbot—before spewing out an ad for “StepBoost Max” insoles.
You can watch the one-minute version below.
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