I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork. This week, ads have arrived in ChatGPT. How will they change OpenAI? Then there's a new constitution for Claude. Anthropic philosopher Amanda Askell is here to talk about how to shape an AI's personality. I'm going to use some of these techniques on you.
Okay. So today we're talking about ads, specifically ads in ChatGPT, because late last week, OpenAI announced that they are going to start testing ads in ChatGPT for logged-in adults in the US on the free and the low-cost Go tiers of ChatGPT.
That's right, Kevin. And we'll discuss it right after these ads.
No, we already did the ads.
Okay.
So at least on my feed, people were reacting to this pretty negatively. I think a lot of people have gotten accustomed to using ChatGPT and other chatbots without a lot of direct commercial pressures. It's a refreshing break from all of the ads that have been shoveled at us on other platforms for years. And so collectively, I think people were just sort of resigned, like, ah, you know, we knew that the honeymoon would be over eventually and that we'd be forced to see ads in chat like we are everywhere else.
Yeah. I think people can just remember products that they used that once did not have ads and now do. And no one thinks of the moment that ads arrived as the moment when the product got really good.
Yeah. Right. Right. I think there are some exceptions. I mean, some people like Instagram ads, for example, but I think mostly people see this as sort of a blight on the internet. Maybe a necessary blight, but a blight nonetheless. And I think people were also surprised that OpenAI was moving in this direction because of some things that Sam Altman has said in the past about how he doesn't like ads and how he wanted to basically treat this as a last resort for OpenAI. Some people were saying, 'Oh, this means that they're in trouble. They need to raise a bunch of money, you know, so they can keep building out their data centers and things like that.' So Casey, what did you make of OpenAI's announcement about ads?
Well, Kevin, on one hand, I think this is inevitable. There's an analyst I follow, Eric Seufert, who often says that everything is an ad network, and if you have hundreds of millions of people coming and paying attention to a service every single week, inevitably there's going to just be overwhelming pressure to put ads on it. Also, we know that OpenAI needs revenue, right? This is the company that has laid out the most ambitious infrastructure investment project in human history. They have nowhere close to the money needed to build it, and we just know that they would not have been able to fulfill their dreams on subscription revenue alone. That said, as you point out, Sam Altman himself said that ads were going to be a last resort. A great Papa Roach song. And so in this moment, we now are at the last resort. And so I think it's just interesting that after everything else they tried, eventually they just said, 'Look, to do what we need to do, we've got to sort of break glass. The emergency is here.'
Yeah. They said, 'Cut my life into pieces because this is my last resort.'
And the question is, will this cut their life into pieces?
Yes. So, we're going to get there, but first our disclosures. The New York Times is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity over alleged copyright violations related to the training of large language models. And my boyfriend works at Anthropic. Let's just start with the actual announcement that they made, because they not only said that they were going to start testing ads, they also gave some previews of what these ads are going to be. And if you look at their sort of mockup version of their ads, it's a kind of bolt-on to the ChatGPT answer. They've been very clear that this is not going to influence the answer that ChatGPT gives, or so they claim. Instead, it's a little banner at the bottom of the answer in the mockup. Someone is asking ChatGPT for ideas for a dinner party, and ChatGPT gives a response, and then at the bottom there's a little sponsored banner for Harvest Groceries, including a link where you can go and buy some hot sauce. And if I could just pause there, I have to say, Kevin, I'm already feeling lied to for this reason. They have said to us, your query is not going to affect the advertisement that we're showing you. And yet here you have someone saying, 'I want some ideas for cooking Mexican food for my dinner party.' And ChatGPT says, 'Well, here's some groceries, including hot sauce.' It sure feels like something was being influenced there, right? Like the message is being tied to the query.
Well, no. So their response to this would be that there are two parts of this response. There's the actual response from the model, and then there's the ad. And what they're saying is not that they won't show you ads that are relevant to the thing that you're asking ChatGPT about. It's that there's this sort of sacrosanct part of the actual reply from the model that they are not going to let advertisers pay their way into. That is what they're claiming, anyway.
So that example is a much more straightforward ad, the kind we've seen on Google and Facebook and other platforms for many years. The second kind of ad OpenAI mocked up for this announcement was, I think, more interesting because it shows a new way of interacting with ads. So basically, it's, you know, a user's planning a trip to Santa Fe. ChatGPT pops up this little sponsor widget from this desert cottages, I don't know, I guess, hotel or resort thing, and it'll present you with an option where you can go and chat with the advertiser and ask more questions before deciding whether or not to make a purchase. Such a relatable question. I think we've all had the experience of just watching ads on TV and saying, 'Why can't I have a conversation with this? I want to share my thoughts with McDonald's right now, but I can't.' But now you can.
Yes. So, let's talk about the ad principles that OpenAI laid out as part of this announcement, because I think it sort of gives a sense of the objections that they're trying to get ahead of.
There are five principles. They say mission alignment, answer independence, conversation privacy, choice and control, and long-term value. Basically, I think they are sensitive to the criticism that putting ads into ChatGPT means that they are now going to start directing people to more commercial types of use cases, optimizing for engagement, trying to make people spend more time in the app. I think these are very reasonable fears that people, including me, have. But this is sort of their attempt to say, 'Well, we're introducing this, but don't worry, your experience of chat is not going to change.'
Yeah. I was talking about this story with my friend Alex over the weekend, and he said, 'You know, I'm so excited about ads in chat. I'm going to tell it my lower back hurts, and it will ask me if I've tried mesquite barbecue sauce.' And like that is the fear, you know.
No, I mean, yes, there will be some initial stumbles about that, but I think the longer-term worry here is that ad platforms, as they mature and get better and get more data, they tend to sort of try to confuse their users, right? We've seen there's this amazing graphic that I think about a lot. Search Engine Land, the blog that covers Google and other search engines, made this sort of timeline of how Google's ad labels have changed over the years. And it's pretty amazing because like at first when they first introduced ads into Google Search, they were very noticeable. They had sort of like a different color background. They really stood out on the page. And then you just see over time with each successive update, you know, it gets a little closer to the organic search results. Eventually they do away with the colored backgrounds. They have this little like yellow ad icon, and then that icon gets smaller and less noticeable, and then it sort of just blends in with the organic content. And I think that's the fear here is that while ChatGPT may start out with these very clearly labeled ad modules, over time as the commercial pressures get more intense, they are just going to have a lot of incentives to blend that advertising content in with the organic responses and make it less noticeable.
Yes. And we've already seen this exact trajectory play out at OpenAI. It went from no ads to ads will be a last resort to ads are now in ChatGPT. So if you think that the bargain is not going to change further, I have news for you.
Totally. And of course now the sort of narrative from OpenAI that we're hearing is, well, this is the only way, ads are the only way to make a free or low-cost product accessible to billions of people. Do you have thoughts on that narrative? Because that's also something that we heard from Facebook back in the day. People would constantly be asking them, oh, like why don't you just charge people to, you know, to join Facebook instead of showing them all these ads? And they would consistently say, oh, well, this, you know, that's not scalable. People in, you know, poorer countries can't afford to pay a subscription fee. And so basically, ads are the only way to reach global scale.
I think on some level I do agree with this. I think that ads and subscriptions are the two core pillars of any media business, and OpenAI is a kind of media business, right? I should also say I don't hate the examples that they use. You know, I'm asking ChatGPT about, you know, making dinner, and it shows me ads for groceries. I don't think that that's like horribly corrosive to the user experience. Nor is I want to take a trip, and it says, 'Well, here's a place where you might stay.' I think if I were a student or I were between jobs, and this meant that I could get access to better AI tools or maybe a higher rate limit than I otherwise could get, I would probably take that trade, right? $20 a month is a lot for most people, you know, and not to mention like $200 a month for an even higher tier. So I think that there is a reason to pursue this. And I think there are ways that it could not be too bad. It has just been my observation that the exact dynamic that you just described always plays out, which is it starts out not all that bad, and then it just progressively gets worse.
Right. Yeah. I think we've made peace with ads in a lot of different contexts. I don't think most people sort of notice or pay attention to them when they can tell that they're ads at all. What I'm watching for, what I'm skeptical of, is whether the actual product and research decisions start sort of bending toward engagement maximization. Like there's this sort of quality that a lot of these, you know, big ad platforms, social networks, search engines, etc., have where like eventually once the ad revenue starts really flowing, the tail kind of starts wagging the dog, and you start making product decisions about, you know, how you want to show information to people with the kind of advertising revenue predominant in your mind. So I think the question is like not like are these first couple of ads that we're seeing from OpenAI going to be good or not. It's whether like two or three years from now ChatGPT is sort of being steered in a way toward ad-friendly topics. And I genuinely just don't know the answer there.
I don't know either, Kevin, but if I had to guess, I would predict that this moment winds up being a pretty significant milestone in the development of ChatGPT in that I think that when you introduce advertising, in particular personalized targeted advertising, it just fundamentally changes the relationship between the product and the user. Think about what personalized targeted ads did over time to trust in Facebook and Instagram. Think about all the conspiracy theories out there that, oh, your phone is listening to you. Not true, by the way. I realize most people still believe that that's true. It's not. But trust in those products is lower because of the incredibly intelligent, invasive feeling personalization that they were able to do inside these products. My prediction is the AI version of this turns out to be even worse. Right? Think about everything that ChatGPT is going to know about you. I think OpenAI is going to bump into that creepy line really quickly where it's showing you stuff, and maybe it's not even using all that much personalized information, but the user is going to feel that they have shared so much of their life with OpenAI that those ads that they start getting just start to feel worse and worse. So this is the dynamic that I am watching is how does it change the relationship of the user base to OpenAI, because I do think that ads can be really corrosive to that.
Yeah. Yeah. And at the same time, the ad models that you mentioned have also made those companies billions of dollars and made them into some of the biggest companies in the world. So I think if you're OpenAI, you're just like staring at this potential huge bucket of money. And it's very hard to pass that up, especially when you have such intense capital needs over the next few years. I should also say like I think this was inevitable given some of the personnel decisions that OpenAI has made. You know, Fidji Simo, who is the CEO of applications over there now, was brought in from Instacart. Before that, she was at Meta for many, many years, and one of her, you know, signal accomplishments there was introducing ads in the mobile news feed, which made them billions of dollars. So that is the kind of person that you hire if you are interested in developing a multi-billion dollar ad platform on your product.
Yeah. Well, one question I have for you about that is how does this change the competitive landscape generally? You have Demis Hassabis saying this week in response to the news that ads are coming to chat, well, we don't have any plans to do that in Gemini. And he sort of took a shot at them. He said maybe they feel like they need to make more revenue. Left unsaid the fact that he works for a giant search monopoly that is able to funnel all of their advertising profits in Google into the product. An observation you made on X, by the way, and it was a great, it's a great one. And so for the moment at least, free users of Gemini will be able to enjoy the subsidy that Mother Google is giving them, and you're not going to have any of these corrosive effects in that product. You also have Anthropic, which has said basically we truly have no plans to do ads in Claude ever. Like we are primarily going to be selling to businesses, and so this is just not our concern. And for the moment, I don't have any illusions that Claude is going to grow to compete with ChatGPT. But over time, if the experience does get worse in an ad-supported chatbot, I could see lots of people wanting an alternative. I think in this sense, like OpenAI and Google are much more directly competing on ads than OpenAI and Anthropic. Anthropic has sort of said, you guys can fight over consumer. We're going to focus on the enterprise here.
I think it's a really hard fight for OpenAI to pick. I mean, Google has, as you said, this like enormous established search ad business. They have advertisers all over the world who are already spending money on Google, whose, you know, details and payment information and workflows already include like Google and its products. And so I think OpenAI coming in and trying to build a Google-style ad platform is just like a harder uphill battle than it might have been a couple years ago.
Yeah. And also we should say that even though ads aren't going to be in Gemini, they are in the AI overviews in Google search, right? So in that sense, Google even has a head start against OpenAI.
Totally. So Casey, what do you think is motivating this decision now by OpenAI? Like does it tell us anything about the state of their business or maybe some wobbliness in their financials that they are going out and doing this now?
Well, one thing is that it is a reaction to how much ChatGPT grew in the last year. They have hundreds of millions of users. They now have to support many of those users. The majority of them are on the free tier, right? Which means that OpenAI is losing money on every single one of them. And so I think it has just increasingly become a priority for the company to figure out, hey, how can we like monetize these people in some way so we aren't losing quite as much money? They've also just been designing more and more products that have obvious advertising-shaped holes. They released Pulse last year, this sort of daily summary that comes up for paid users. That seems like a natural place to throw in a bunch of ads. They launched Sora last year, the infinite video slop feed. They explicitly said at the time, we are going to use this to generate revenue to fund our long-term ambitions. So they're building homes for ads. They need the ad revenue. And now all of that is starting to come together.
Yeah, I think you're right. And I think that, you know, all these companies are realizing that they're going to need, you know, billions of dollars, some of them hundreds of billions of dollars to fulfill their ambitions. And it's just not easy to do that when you're charging people 20 bucks a month for a subscription. You got to sell a lot of subscriptions to do that. And so I think OpenAI reasonably is concluding that like the subscription model alone just isn't going to cut it for them. That's not unique to them. Netflix has also, you know, started adopting ads for its lower-cost plans. Disney Plus, yeah, many other businesses have done this as well. I will just say like I enjoy paying for AI products. I mean, I am privileged in that in the sense that I can like afford to, but I kind of like the idea that I am paying for something that is like an undiluted, unsullied experience. I really hope that as these companies do start pushing more into ads, that they maintain that ability to do what I do and pay your way into the sort of top-level version of that experience.
Yeah. Well, you know, people once felt this way about Google search, right? They felt like this is an unsullied, undiluted picture of the web, and when I search for a website, I am going to get the best answer to my query. And then a bunch of search engine optimizers came in and were paid a lot of money to try to rejigger the search index so that their clients showed up at the top of the page. And then Google built one of the largest advertising businesses in the world and let all of those advertisers put their results on top of the good ones. So, you know, there have been people saying now for over a year that the versions of these chatbots that we're using might be the best that they ever are in that core respect, that this is sort of the last moment of purity before commercial incentives come in and warp the whole thing. And that is, you know, my big concern about what we're starting to see here.
Well, and that's not just a concern about advertising. I mean, another thing that we've seen over the past year or two is like now all these businesses are starting to hire these AI optimization firms who say, 'Oh, we can make your restaurant or your hotel or your, you know, craft shop appear higher in ChatGPT search results.' That is something that is not flowing through OpenAI's ad platform and probably won't. But in the same way that like Google ads and Google SEO were sort of different economies but both had the effect of kind of degrading the quality of search results, I think OpenAI has to tangle with both of those things.
Yeah. All right. So a year from now, Kevin, what do you think we will have seen in the development of ads, both in ChatGPT and across the landscape here? And do you think it is going to mark the beginning of a fundamental change in the way that people use chatbots?
I think we're going to have kind of a haves and have-nots situation where if you are someone who can afford to pay for the premium versions of these chatbots, your experience will be pretty much what it is today. You will get access to the latest models. You will not have a bunch of ads cluttering up your results from the models, and you will not feel the kind of commercialization of AI in this specific way. I think that if you are a free user of these platforms and you cannot afford or don't want to pay for the premium versions, I think that experience is going to be much worse a year or two from now. I am a YouTube Premium subscriber and have been for a long time.
And whenever I like, you know, talk to a friend who doesn't pay for YouTube or whenever I like see YouTube running on their computer, it's always horrifying. Like I'm like, how do you like I understand that this is the majority experience, but like they've shoved so many ads into every single video. Those ads are like unskippable. They run for a long time. Like it's a terrible experience. And I think that's going to be sort of what we see in chatbots, too. What about you?
It's a grim prediction, but it is actually the one that I share. The haves and have-nots framing was the one that I was going to use. And when you said it, I thought, 'Oh my god, I actually have my mind melded with this man. I spent too long in the studio, and now his thoughts are my own. It's creeping me out.' So I'm actually going to get out of here. I need to take a walk or something.
Casey, a couple years ago, you came back from a dinner party that you had been to, and you told me I just sat next to the most fascinating person in the world.
I really felt that way, Kevin. I had been at a dinner where Amanda Askell was one of the guests. Amanda works at Anthropic and is sometimes called the Claude Mother because of the role that she plays in shaping Claude's personality. Now let me say, since I first met Amanda, my boyfriend has gone to work for Anthropic. So I'm going to make an extra disclosure because this segment is about that company. But the basic feeling I had at that dinner remains true, which is that this is one of the most fascinating people in the world.
Yes, I agree. Amanda is also a somewhat unusual figure in the AI world. She is a philosopher by training. She has a PhD in philosophy. She went to work at OpenAI during its early days and then moved over to Anthropic a little bit later. And for the past several years, she has been the person at Anthropic who is most concerned with how is this model supposed to behave in the world.
Yeah. And I just I love that story, Kevin, about Amanda's background because we all know somebody who studied philosophy in college, and we all know how much flak they would get for choosing such a frivolous way of spending their life of just sort of, you know, navel-gazing for years on end, writing arcane documents that no one ever read. And Amanda is a person who studied philosophy and now has this incredibly high-stakes job where she is trying to shape the behavior of a model that is so, so consequential.
Yes. And Amanda has been on our short list of guests that we wanted to get on the show for a very long time. We were just kind of looking for the right time and reason to get her on, and now we have one because her team at Anthropic has just released a new constitution for Claude. This is a very long document that is given to Claude to kind of tell it how it should behave, but also give it a sense of its obligations. It is not really a list of rules. This is not the Ten Commandments for Claude. It's more like a document about how Claude should perceive and reflect upon its role in the world.
Now, does it have to be ratified by two-thirds of states, Kevin, or is this already in effect?
I think this is already in effect.
Yes. But there is a possibility that we could have a constitutional crisis.
Aside from your disclosure about your boyfriend working at Anthropic, I think we should also just be upfront with people and say this is going to be a hard conversation for some of our listeners. If you are a person who still believes that these language models are merely doing kind of next-token prediction, that there's nothing really going on under the hood, that they are just sort of simulating thinking rather than doing actual thinking themselves, you may be approaching this and saying these people sound crazy. What are they talking about?
Yeah. And it is okay if you feel that way, but I think it is still important to understand how people in high-ranking positions at these big labs think and talk about their own work because it is having an effect on the products they release. I would also put it to you that there are just a huge number of people right now who are working on the proposition that you might be able to emulate a human brain, and that the better you get at that, the likelier it is that this emulator has something resembling thoughts and feelings and maybe something resembling an identity. And so if that question disgusts you, you will probably not like this segment. But if you have just the slightest bit of curiosity about it, well, I hope you'll find it quite interesting.
Yeah. So, let's welcome in Amanda Askell.
Amanda Askell, welcome to Hard Fork.
Hey, Amanda. So, we've described you as a philosopher who is in charge of Claude's personality. Is that an accurate description of your job? What do you do?
Yeah, I guess I try to think about what Claude's character should be like and articulate that to Claude, and you know, try to train Claude to be more like that. So, yeah, it's a pretty accurate description.
I think this is a really unusual role that you have. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came into this role, and do you find yourself as surprised that your background in philosophy wound up leading you to such a high-stakes place?
Yeah, it's really interesting because you know my path wasn't like a kind of straight one. You know, I have said before that like if you do a PhD in ethics, I think there's a risk that you end up doing something else because you're kind of thinking like you're thinking a lot about like goodness, the nature of ethics, the problems in the world, and then sometimes you're like, I am spending three years like writing a document that's going to be read by like 17 people. Is this the thing that I should be doing? You know, like it can definitely make you kind of question that. And so when I went into AI, it wasn't necessarily even with like, oh, like philosophy is going to be really useful. I was just kind of like there's probably a lot of space for people who are enthusiastic, who have like skills, are willing to learn, and like this seems important. So you know, like I originally started out in policy, and then when Anthropic started, it was actually you know it was very small, and so I joined mostly with like a kind of I'm just like willing to help with like various aspects of this because I had been working a little bit in like model evaluation and things like that. So I don't know. Sometimes I think people think, oh, you started out as this like philosopher, and I'm like, well, it was a startup. I was just kind of doing anything that needed done, like, right?
And then was it there some moment where you sort of like get into the building of some like early Claude model, and someone stands up and yells, 'Hey, is there a philosopher on the house?'
Yeah. I mean, I tried to, you know, you can do like Slack groups where you can like I try to make an app philosophers one, you know, for philosophy emergencies. And that group virtually never gets called upon. There are like a few of us now, and like you can in fact declare a philosophical emergency that just doesn't happen that much.
Well, we'll see if we can try to trigger one by the end of the conversation.
So let's start by going back to last month. This so-called soul doc starts circulating on the internet. People are playing around with Opus 4.5, the newest model of Claude. And a couple of them claimed to have sort of elicited this document that Claude was sort of referring to as the soul doc. What was that thing that people were discovering and circulating?
