Not quite 18 months ago, Sam Altman said that OpenAI putting ads in ChatGPT was definitely certainly probably not a good idea.

“Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” he said at a Harvard event in October 2024. “I kind of think of ads as, like, a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody on the world—in the world—like, access to great services.”

Just a few weeks ago, Sam Altman said that OpenAI was putting ads into ChatGPT.

The last resort has thrown open its doors. And it still seems like it’s still probably not a good idea.

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Now, I am not an expert in OpenAI’s business, or on the potential revenue that ChatGPT might be able to generate by sliding advertising into a machine that uses stolen words and inscrutable technology to generate false information. (If you want to know more about that stuff, perhaps read Ben Thompson or Ed Zitron or somebody else who is either more informed or funnier.)

But I am a human being who spends time on the internet, and therefore I do know that advertising is not just the last resort: it’s very much a problem rather than a solution.

I am also, as it goes, a human who can do basic mathematics. Therefore I know that if you’re hoping for ads to prop up your business’ projected $1.4 trillion in spending— which means we’re ultimately relying on ads to prop up the $3 trillion+ AI bubble which is in turn helping keep the stock market going, then advertising isn’t just a problem: it’s the domino that’s going to knock all the others over.

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A quick note, though: I don’t hate advertising. As somebody who has worked in media for 25 years, I appreciate how important ads are to helping all kinds of businesses run. Big ads, small ads, personal ads, job ads. They all have a place. And let’s face it, they’re not going away any time soon. Plus, ads can be relevant, funny, entertaining and even poignant. The best ones stick with us, they become part of the culture. I quote lines from 1980s TV commercials as often as I quote The Princess Bride. Nor do I believe, unlike many newsies, that Craigslist killed newspapers by stealing their ads. I think newspapers were too greedy and inward-looking to realize the opportunity they were missing until it was too late.

But I also know that ads are everywhere. Really, everywhere.

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We’re flooded with them. In the 32 years since the first banner ad hit the web and a full 23 years after Google bought AdSense and super-charged its business, ads have simply gotten more intrusive, more obnoxious and less valuable every single day.

By way of example, I looked at the first 10 posts in my feeds across a variety of websites.

My Instagram feed was 40% advertising (and this was after I suppressed some suggested posts.) Same with Facebook. Reddit was lower at 20% ads, but 30% were suggested posts—so fully half of the content wasn’t actually stuff I wanted to see. My LinkedIn feed, meanwhile, was a whopping 60% ads. Not only is it full of maniacs posting AI-generated hustle screeds; it’s full of maniacs paying to show me their AI-generated hustle screeds.

These are services that are meant to help us connect with other people, but in fact they are merely tubes that help pollute the information ecosystem.

Alternatively, go to almost any large scale news website and you’re bombarded with a thousand tiny ads trying—literally—to get in the way of your reading experience. I’m not even talking about the skeevy clickbait-only slop sites, I’m talking about the “respectable” mid-market news sites, your local channels, your upscale outlets with paywalls and lots of subscribers. Finding the information you are looking for requires dodging your way through a hail of shitty bullets.

During one of Medium‘s many pivots, we were searching for ways to make money from the business, and started building out advertising. (The first project there had actually been a paywall, since we had built our own version for the initial version of Matter.) But even a high-value ad network is still an ad network, which on the internet inevitably means being presented, eventually, with choices that put the best interests of readers and writers in conflict with the best interests of the bank. So we stopped doing it. I disagreed with Ev Williams on many things, but he was right on this.

I suppose what I’m saying is that ads are important, and we aren’t going to get rid of them any time soon, but that doesn’t mean they own us. They are always, always a slippery slope.

And the idea that in 2026 our entire economy is essentially reliant on a Potemkin city of AI companies, each one balanced on the precarious promise of ad revenue? I would have to agree with Sam Altman: that feels uniquely unsettling… and probably, definitely, certainly not a good idea.