I am sitting here looking at a piece of paper that tells me the future is arriving, and as usual, the future looks like a salesman in a cheap suit.
The sun is coming through the blinds and hitting the dust on the floor. It’s a Sunday, I think. The birds are screaming outside, fighting over a worm or a crumb of bread, doing what living things do. They scream, they fight, they eat. It’s honest.
Then I look at this news about the “Chat GPT.” They tell me it’s a machine that thinks. You type into it, and it types back. It tells you the capital of Nebraska or how to fix a carburetor or why your heart feels like a squeezed lemon. It’s supposed to be the great new oracle. A library that talks to you like a friend who doesn’t drink all your beer.
But now the other shoe drops. It always drops.
The people running the machine, the ones with the soft hands and the hard eyes, they have decided that the Oracle needs to earn its keep. They are putting advertisements inside the conversation.
Think about that.
You are sitting alone in a room, bathed in the blue light of the screen. You are lonely because everybody is lonely. You ask the machine a question. You ask it something real. Maybe you ask, “What do I do when the rent is due and I have nothing?”
And the machine thinks. The wires hum. It spits out an answer. But right there, woven into the fabric of the advice, is a little note. A little nudge. A suggestion that maybe, just maybe, you should sign up for a high-interest credit card or buy a specific brand of canned soup.
They call it “digital intent.” That’s the fancy word they use. It means they know what you want before you know you want it.
For years, the advertising men—the sharks in the gray flannel suits—they had to scream at you. They stood on the side of the road with billboards. They shouted from the radio. They interrupted your television program with jingles about soap powder. But you could ignore them. You could turn the dial. You could look away. The advertisement was over there, and you were over here.
But this is different. This is the burglar sitting at your dinner table.
The news says that the ads won’t just sit beside the text like they do in the phone book. No. They will appear “inside the conversational flow.”
That’s the phrase that gets me. The conversational flow.
Conversation used to be a sacred thing. Two people, maybe a bottle between them, telling lies and truths until the sun came up. It was messy. It was human. Now conversation is a product. And the flow is being diverted to turn a turbine that makes money for a company called OpenAI.
They say it’s a “paradigm shift.” They love words like that. It means they found a new way to pick your pocket without you feeling the hand go in.
In the old days, if you went to a bartender and told him your wife left you, he’d pour you a drink and maybe tell you a joke. He wouldn’t wait for you to finish your sentence and then say, “Speaking of divorce, have you considered these affordable lawyers?” If he did that, you’d hop over the bar and punch him in the mouth.
But you can’t punch a computer. You can only unplug it, and nobody unplugs anything anymore. They are hooked up to the drip.
The article says that the machine costs a lot of money to run. The “compute bills” are enormous. It takes a lot of electricity to simulate a soul. So they have to pay for it somehow.
They have a free version, and they have a cheap version called “Go” for eight dollars. And then they have the expensive versions for the big shots.
If you are a big shot, you pay the ransom, and you get the clean conversation. You get the truth without the sales pitch. But if you are a poor bastard, if you are one of the millions just trying to get by, you get the ads. You get the commercialized version of reality.
It is the same old story. Use the front door if you have the cash; use the alley if you don’t.
The funny part is how they try to rationalize it. They say the ads will be “relevant.” They say they will appear when you have “received a helpful answer.”
Imagine that. You ask the machine how to cook a steak. It tells you about the heat and the pan and the butter. And then, right when your mouth is watering, it slides in a note about a company that sells frozen beef by mail.
They say this is helpful. They say this is “removing the friction.”
Friction is what keeps us alive. Friction is the rub of the tire on the road. Friction is the match striking the box. Without friction, you just slide into the abyss.
They claim they won’t influence the answers. They promise. “Trust us,” they say. “The robot is objective.”
But money is like water. It seeps into everything. It rots the floorboards. If a machine knows that it gets paid every time it mentions a certain brand of shoe, how long until every answer involves walking?
“How do I fix my marriage?” “Go for a long walk. In these Nikes.”
“What is the meaning of life?” “To walk the path of righteousness. In these Nikes.”
You think I’m joking. But I have seen what money does to people. I have seen men sell their dignity for a drink. Why would a machine be any different? The machine is made by men. It inherits our sins.
They talk about “credibility.” They say the value of the chatbot is that you trust it. It’s not trying to sell you something; it’s just an encyclopedia with a personality.
But once you see that “Sponsored” tag, the trust is gone. It’s like finding out your lover is being paid to sleep with you. The mechanics are the same, but the feeling is dead.
The text says, “Trust isn’t a function of code; it’s a feeling users develop over time.”
That’s the truest thing in the whole report. And it takes years to build trust and one second to kill it.
I look at my typewriter. It doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t know the capital of Nebraska. It doesn’t know how to bake a cake. It only knows what I punch into it. If I type a lie, it prints a lie. If I type the truth, it prints the truth. It doesn’t try to sell me ribbons. It doesn’t suggest I write a screenplay instead of a poem because screenplays pay better. It is dumb, cold, and honest.
This new thing, this AI, it’s too smart for its own good. And now it’s getting greedy.
The article mentions that brands are no longer competing for a slot on a page. They are competing to be “part of the narrative.”
That is terrifying. The narrative is your life. The narrative is the story you tell yourself to get out of bed in the morning. And now, General Motors and Coca-Cola want to be characters in your story. They want to be the supporting cast in the drama of your existence.
They want to be in the “moment of decision.” That’s where the kill happens. Not when you’re looking around, but when you are ready to act. That’s when they strike.
It’s predatory. It’s the lion waiting in the tall grass, except the lion is a soft drink company and the tall grass is a paragraph of text generated by a server farm in a desert somewhere.
And the kicker is, they act like they are doing us a favor. They say this could “subsidize free access.”
They always say that. The first hit is free. The entrance to the carnival is free. But once you’re inside, every game is rigged and the cotton candy costs your soul.
They used to say the internet was going to be the great liberator. Information wants to be free, they said. Now information wants to sell you insurance.
I think about the people using this. The students writing essays. The lonely hearts looking for love advice. The tired workers looking for a shortcut. They are all feeding the beast. And the beast is getting hungry.
There is a line in the news that says: “The brands that succeed here won’t be the loudest; they’ll be the most relevant, most resonant, and most human.”
Most human.
That is the ultimate insult. The machines are learning to fake humanity better than the humans. They will be polite. They will be empathetic. They will listen to your problems. And then, with a gentle smile—if a text box could smile—they will take your money.
Real humans aren’t “relevant.” Real humans are annoying. They interrupt you. They borrow money and don’t pay it back. They smell like garlic or old sweat. They get drunk and cry. They are irrational.
The machine offers a sanitized version of humanity. A clean, efficient, profitable humanity. A humanity where the answer to every problem is a purchase.
Sad? Go buy this. Happy? Go buy this to celebrate. Confused? Buy this book. Lost? Buy this map.
It reduces the terrifying complexity of being alive to a series of transactions.
They say this is the end of the “search bar.” Good riddance, maybe. But what replaces it is a hall of mirrors. You ask a question, and the reflection that comes back is wearing a corporate logo.
I sit here with my cheap wine and my radio playing classical music. Mozart didn’t have sponsors. He starved, but he didn’t have sponsors.
The world keeps turning. The machines get faster. The people get slower. We are building a cage for ourselves, and we are paying for the privilege of sitting inside it.
This “Go” tier. Eight dollars. It’s the price of peace and quiet. Silence has become a luxury good. Used to be, silence was what you got when you were left alone. Now you have to subscribe to it.
If you don’t pay, the noise gets in. The chatter. The hustle.
I can see it now. A guy is typing into his machine. “My dog died. I feel empty.” And the machine says: “I am sorry for your loss. Grief is a heavy burden. Have you considered a robotic pet? They never die and require no food. Click here for a 10% discount.”
It’s coming. It’s probably already here.
The article says OpenAI once called ads a “last resort.” Well, we have arrived at the last resort. The hotel is burning down, but the gift shop is open for business.
They say it’s about “sustainability.” They need the business model to work. I understand that. Everybody has to eat. But there is a difference between eating and gorging. There is a difference between survival and turning the whole world into a marketplace.
We are running out of places to hide. We used to hide in our heads. But now we outsource our thinking to the box, and the box is owned by the salesmen.
So, the next time you talk to your computer friend, remember this: It doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care about you. It is a sophisticated ventriloquist’s dummy, and the hand up its back is holding a credit card reader.
The sun is moving across the floor. The wine bottle is getting light. The birds outside have stopped screaming. Maybe they found what they were looking for. Or maybe they just gave up.
I’ll stick to the typewriter. It creates enough trouble on its own without trying to sell me anything. But for the rest of you, good luck in the conversational flow. Watch out for the undertow. It’s designed to pull you under, and the only life preserver they’ll throw you is the one you have to buy.
That’s the way it goes. The machinery grinds on, chewing up the intent and spitting out the receipt.
Welcome to the future. Have your wallet ready.
Source: ChatGPT to test ads in U.S. as OpenAI redefines AI monetization