Just received a Chatgpt privacy update and it stated:
Ads may appear on Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Enterprise, Business and Education plans do not have ads.
The enshittification begins…
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Funny but people never talked about the enshitification of TV, which has had ads forever.
In fact, from my point of view, tv quality got worse with Netflix. Quality up, quality down. But then, maybe I’m just not the target audience.
I’m really grateful that I can afford to mostly not pay for adverts.
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I agree. I don’t have a UK TV license as I don’t want live TV. I won’t pay to watch adverts. I pay for Youtube as my kids need it for school and so no adverts. I see an advert maybe a couple of times a year.
IMO, the worst culprits are not TV but news outlets.
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Although the language was very different back in the 1950s, this WAS talked about a lot in the UK before a single commercial TV network supported by advertising was allowed to join the public BBC (paid for by a licence to receive live TV and Radio from any source). Similar debates preceded the introduction of commercial radio and the massive expansion of TV channels later.
I wasn’t part of any of those debates (and wasn’t even alive in the early 1950s!), but the history and assumptions behind the BBC and the resistance to them from those who wanted things to be solely commercial because they ideologically believed in the “free market” is fascinating, satisfyingly complicated and still very much alive. I’d recommend the Origin Stories podcast. https://overcast.fm/+AA5yGUBFdL8
News outlets will spin a 2 min news update into a 25 mins section with 10 2 min ads which could have been delivered within 3 mins.
Even if one pays for the Cable TV, still a person will be forced to watch ads in news.
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True, and a lot of shows were sponsored by tobacco companies. Others had names like Kraft Television Theatre and Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom. I watched the Sealtest Big Top Circus on Saturday mornings. As I recall it was a live broadcast that opened by showing the show’s name painted on the top of a clown’s head.
Years later I learned that clown was Ed McMahon, who later became Johnny Carson’s sidekick. 
They talked about it, but it was decades ago!
The number of minutes devoted to ads have increased considerable through the years, about doubling since the 50’s. And then there is this Television and the Public Interest - Wikipedia
The famous Newton Minow “Vast Wasteland” speech in 1961 about the decrease in the quality of television through the 1950s.
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Ads are certainly relevant in many areas. I like certain verticals where the ads are in context and helpful. However in the tech world ads are use to supplement lost revenue and they can represent and potentially toxic influence on products that are information based as a core competency. Ads are tacit admission that the dream of computing super intelligence has not be met and that the conversion numbers for free tier user to paying subscribers is poor.
It’s an overall poor look for LLM AI frontier models
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Someone probably posted this already
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That is fantastic!
20 characters
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I cannot quantify that, but I have noticed that when trying to watch the local news, my sense is that it is split fifty-fifty between advertisements and actual news. I thought about timing the news and the advertisements in order to quantify the ratio, but I just have not taken the time, no pun intended. 
From a US-centric standpoint, broadcast/OTA TV has also always been free. In principle, I think people historically understood that the TV signal was free because of the ads.
Hence, I don’t consider it “enshittifcation” if OpenAI just puts ads on the free plan. But ultimately, ads on a paid platform are the platform saying “you’re not paying us enough.” If they’re starting in on the paid plans (“Go” is $8/month), I think that’s a disturbing trend. Just price the plan at what it needs to be for a given usage limit.
I wonder what chatgpt would do if you asked it a question and told it not to show any ads in its response?
I reckon the ads are mostly there to help people want to pay not to have them.
Youtube premium did that to me.
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“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
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We’ll rapidly find out how good they ACTUALLY are at preventing prompt injection. 
I just asked ChatGPT what the number of minutes of advertising per hour on TV since the 1950s and got this table:
Here’s a rough historical trend for a typical one-hour prime-time program:
| Era | Approx. Advertising per Hour |
|---|---|
| 1950s | 6–9 minutes |
| 1960s | 9–12 minutes |
| 1970s | 12–14 minutes |
| 1980s | 14–16 minutes |
| 1990s | 16–18 minutes |
| 2000s | 18–20 minutes |
| 2010s | 18–21 minutes |
| 2020s | 15–22 minutes (depending on platform) |
Yes ChatGPT, but, IMHO, not an hallucination.
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That’s interesting. I wonder what it would be for 2026. We are getting close to half of the content being advertising. That’s obnoxious.
It’s easy enough to check for any given show. Just find the show on a streaming platform that offers it for sale, and it will tell you the episode length. Anything else in its time slot is ads.
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began some time ago….