Please Stop the Charade

OpenAI has announced piloting ads in ChatGPT—as a “benefit to humanity.”

Jan 23, 2026

Their CFO, Sarah Friar, says ads will “democratize” AI by letting OpenAI offer ChatGPT to more people for free.

A noble mission, brought to you by our sponsors.

Can we please stop pretending? Nobody believes the humanitarian song‑and‑dance. Say it with me, kids: Must be the money!

This is about justifying a $500-750 billion valuation (what the actual eff?), underwriting a trillion‑dollar compute build‑out, and monetizing absolutely anything and everything that isn’t bolted to the floor.

I would give anything to be a fly on the wall in the OpenAI boardroom. I imagine it goes something like this:

Sam Altman is pacing in his sporty track shoes:
“Okay team, we need more revenue. Subscriptions are great, but we need scale. Ideas—go.”

Intern #1 (nervously): “Uh… more enterprise deals?”

Sam: “STUPID! We already have those. Next.”

Exec #1: “Wearables?”

Sam: “Jesus. Do you work here? Call Trump and get me more H‑1B1s. Think bigger. Think… empire‑building while saving humanity.”

The room goes silent. An old-fashioned wall clock ticks.

Sam (eyes twinkling): “I’ve got it. The Official Sam Altman Action Figure. Highly poseable Special Ops. Lux doomsday bunker sold separately.”

Awkward laughter.

CFO (warming up): “What about a video game franchise? AGI Quest: The Altman Chronicles. Players level up by training models, dodging regulators, and collecting investor tokens. Bonus points for biased data and copyright infringement. Multiplayer mode where you compete to see who has the biggest… data center.”

Marketing lead: “And a movie trilogy! The Singularity Awakens. Sam as the reluctant hero who must sacrifice his non‑profit soul to save humanity.”

Sam (grinning): “Genius. But why stop there? ChatGPT‑branded energy drink. Code Red. Packed with electrolytes, sugar, caffeine, and psilocybin.”

The team high‑fives.

And now back to reality, which is only slightly less bombastic…

Humanitarianism aside, can we talk about how fundamentally problematic it is to place ads in your chatbot?

Sam Altman at a Harvard Fireside Chat in Oct of 2024 said, “Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling.” But rising costs—billions annually for training and inference—have made them less creepy.

LLMs like ChatGPT already struggle with bias, hallucinations, and drift.

On OpenAI’s website, they say, “We plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.”
Ask about wildlife in Madagascar and get eco‑tourism packages.
Ask about lowering cholesterol and get vitamin peddlers.

This isn’t a minor annoyance. It’s a conflict of interest baked into a tool used by nearly a billion people for research, decision‑making, mental health guidance, and creative work. Ads erode trust in an already fragile system, turning what should be neutral (but imperfect) intelligence into a marketplace.

If OpenAI’s goal were truly to build AGI “for the benefit of humanity,” they would still be a nonprofit.

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A satirical treatment of the AI apocalypse—when a “perfect” new girl arrives at an elite Seattle prep school and usurps Zoey’s soon‑to‑be valedictorian status, her mother Erica embarks on an unhinged search for truth that pulls her into the heart of an AI empire and a fight for her daughter’s soul.