On Wednesday, former OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig published a guest essay in The Latest York Times announcing that she resigned from the corporate on Monday, the identical day OpenAI began testing advertisements inside ChatGPT. Hitzig, an economist and published poet who holds a junior fellowship on the Harvard Society of Fellows, spent two years at OpenAI helping shape how its AI models were built and priced. She wrote that OpenAI’s promoting strategy risks repeating the identical mistakes that Facebook made a decade ago.
“I once believed I could help the people constructing A.I. get ahead of the issues it will create,” Hitzig wrote. “This week confirmed my slow realization that OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I’d joined to assist answer.”
Hitzig didn’t call promoting itself immoral. As an alternative, she argued that the character of the information at stake makes ChatGPT ads especially dangerous. Users have shared medical fears, relationship problems, and spiritual beliefs with the chatbot, she wrote, often “because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda.” She called this accrued record of private disclosures “an archive of human candor that has no precedent.”
She also drew a direct parallel to Facebook’s early history, noting that the social media company once promised users control over their data and the power to vote on policy changes. Those pledges eroded over time, Hitzig wrote, and the Federal Trade Commission found that privacy changes Facebook marketed as giving users more control actually did the other.
She warned that an analogous trajectory could play out with ChatGPT: “I consider the primary iteration of ads will probably follow those principles. But I’m nervous subsequent iterations won’t, because the corporate is constructing an economic engine that creates strong incentives to override its own rules.”
Ads arrive after every week of AI industry sparring
Hitzig’s resignation adds one other voice to a growing debate over promoting in AI chatbots. OpenAI announced in January that it will begin testing ads within the US for users on its free and $8-per-month “Go” subscription tiers, while paid Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers wouldn’t see ads. The corporate said ads would seem at the underside of ChatGPT responses, be clearly labeled, and wouldn’t influence the chatbot’s answers.
