I only ever see this speak from people on the sending end of marketing campaigns. I can't think of the last time I saw someone say anything positive about corporate content. Personally, I go out of my way to not buy anything that I see marketed towards me.

> I can't think of the last time I saw someone say anything positive about corporate content.

A few obvious ones would be: Apple events, anything related to OpenAI or SpaceX.

When I look at influencers, especially those who are selling supplements (Jones, Rogan, Huberman et al.), I see that much of their overall content is purely business-driven, yet people engage with the content and recommend it to others quite willingly.

'Earned' content partnerships (and access journalism) might not be as obvious, but on the sending end it sometimes does get treated as part of corporate content marketing. An example off the top of my head here could be a rather old but influential megapost about Neuralink on Wait But Why – something I'd read start to finish and enjoyed.

All of that said, I think these proposals to have content partnerships and 'brand exposure' without full transparency (as OpenAI is anything but open and transparent about its algorithms) is just another creeping tentacle of sighs the tragedy of the commons.

With publishers' brands. This is not about getting Burger King ads in your ChatGPT responses, it's about getting NYT and Ars Technica's content into (and linked from) ChatGPT responses.

That’s a very fine distinction you are making.

What happens when we get to the point where we are asking ChatGPT where to get a quick burger? Or even how to make a hamburger?

I disagree, I think the distinction is quite clear.

Into your head.

Gotta pay for all that compute somehow.

It's not what users want, it's what users will accept. Many precedents have been set here, unfortunately.

I'd prefer to pay for no-ad version.

You will instead need to pay and see ads at the same time!

It is already norm in too many places to get that maximum revenue…

Why would you be offered this option?

Because I'm willing to pay for it?

You may not be offered a choice because you will be paying even with advertising content present.

In case it's not clear - I'm willing to pay extra for this.

Ok, in this case the businesses will need to consider how many users are like you and how much tweaking they will be required to strip out the promotional material.

Then they will decide if to offer this functionality and at what price.

Like with cable or how streaming services are headed?

They literally charge a LOT for their services

$20 ARPU averages out to about $1 in profit in typical SaaS. Gotta generate more than that to make investors whole, unfortunately

ML inference should cost a lot more to run than typical SaaS too... that said, I'd pay more than $20/mo for access to GPT4 or Claude 3. It is worth at least $75/mo to me. I pay for both right now just in case one is better than the other for a certain task (though I might drop GPT soon).

If I can multiselect my favorite programming authors and adjust their influence on my team's work I'm all in. If they do it for me or because someone pays them too, I'll gippity right off this train.

That is just corporate jargon for transferring money from customers to businesses.

And—more important and scarce for some of us—attention.

The end user that refuses to pay for services they use under some misplaced guise of "anything on the internet I am entitled to for free".

I mean that was how it worked at the beginning and what the big companies all lavished. "It's all FREE!" They spent a couple decades hammering that home. And then they said "sike, pay us and we won't serve you ads but also we'll keep increasing the price and serve ads anyway lol", but the end user has a "misplaced guise". Hmmmkay then.

I love when people say stuff like this. When people read “interact with brand” they automatically assume it is some dumb, low value garbage like chatting with Burger King.

You “interact with brands” all of the time. You are literally posting this on YC’s public forum, an asset which YC uses to foster a community of the consumers of its investment portfolio’s products. You are interacting with the brand.

It's one thing to "interact with a brand" by directly using their products, it's another thing to "interact with a brand" by receiving unsolicited advertisements which get in the way of whatever you were trying to accomplish.

Yes.

People assume that because they are correct.

It is always vacuous. Always. If it wasn't, money would not be changing hands.

No one's paying corporate sponsorship money so I can have more foot to centura carpet interaction in my house. They're paying openAI money as compensation for them actively making their product worse.

No, people assume that because they only identify it when, to them, it is vacuous and terrible. They barely notice it, if at all, when it is effectively targeted at them.