AI Was Always About Money

First, they hook you, then they perpetually worsen the product and price-gouge.

Adverts are the succubus of the Internet.

The riches they promise, forever tempting and seducing tech companies to monetise whatever product or service they have, no matter the cost to user experience. In many cases, that cost has been to make much of the Internet unusable. I hate Internet ads with a passion, the constant stream of popups, banners, paywalls, and don’t get me started on adverts on paid tiers in streaming.

AI was meant to be different. Or at least that’s what the cheerleaders have been telling us. With such a revolutionary technology, how could there not be plenty of paths to profitability? Well, those profits are nowhere to be seen. Businesses have been seeing poor returns (senior executives at Salesforce, one of the biggest AI pushers, have admitted, both internally and publicly, that they massively overestimated AI’s capabilities). And while some users do pay, many settle for free options. For OpenAI, only 5% of its weekly users pay for Plus or Pro plans, and even then, each of these subscriptions loses the company money. They are literally burning through cash to run every prompt, and haven’t been able to innovate a moneymaker — shitty video products and porny AI have done little to move the needle — and, what a surprise, they’ve resorted to the same idea that every other tech company has sold their soul for.

Advertising. The trusty old playbook: First, they hook you, then they perpetually worsen the product and price-gouge.

What a thoroughly depressing outcome. Sam Altman said that ads would be a LAST RESORT. Yet, here we are, only a year or so later. I think it was always on the cards. Thanks to his shady manoeuvring and backdoor dealings, he cut loose from the original non-profit goals and set a new North Star: Shareholders’ wallets. Long gone are the days of its mission to do good by humanity — if you still believe that, you’ve been drinking the Silicon Valley flavoured Kool-Aid again — and that has changed both the objective and the priorities.

This shift shows just how shaky the ground is under OpenAI. Money is drying up, leaving Sam Altman searching for funding in Saudi Arabia. Microsoft’s filings show OpenAI lost ~$12B through July to September 2025, against reported profits of $13 billion for the entire year. According to Forbes, the company sets $15 million on fire every single day to keep Sora running, its shitty social media sludge machine. Google has been eating its market share, and ironically, is propped up by the world’s biggest advertising machine (read: illegal monopoly), giving it a huge runway to pursue profitless AI. Even Meta, while failing to produce competitive products, has the same leeway thanks to the frankly absurd profits it rakes in from its own advertising empire in Facebook. If it’s a fight till the bank account runs dry, OpenAI loses. Lawsuits are piling up, with cases ranging from infringements and IP theft to wrongful death and assisted suicide. Its last few model releases have been underwhelming, showing that scaling alone will not take us to the promised land of AGI. It’s not unfair to say the company could be dying in front of our eyes.

The move to ads is nothing more than desperation.

And what of these ads? Well, they look shit, take up half the damn screen, and will have a serious impact on the user experience. For now, the company claims that “Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you” and that “We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.” Do we trust that? And how do they define conversations?

OpenAI ad example

I think we all know what happens next. The schmucks (that’s us) show the company they don’t really care, and before we know it, we’ll have adverts in the answers, sponsored responses, and all sorts of privacy issues, with our most intimate responses being sold off to the highest bidder. I can already see the “Sam Altman Is Selling Your Conversations” headlines coming down the road. If you use ChatGPT as your therapist (no comment), I suggest you take a rain check on that for now.

As Alberto Romero writes —

Do you really think that an AI company like OpenAI, capable of training a bot to win the Mathematical Olympiad and a worldwide coding challenge, can’t train that same bot to maximize revenue as a function of advertising in a way that destroys the user experience without entering into conflict with their stated principles? That’s what they do for a living!

I also think one pretty glaring problem got missed in this rollout. Google can afford not to put ads in its AI products (thanks to the other products they ruined with adverts). That means users can quit ChatGPT and move to another service that won’t serve them ads or ask them to pay not to see them. It’s essentially asking users to switch, and a good chunk are going to. Hardly a master stroke? 

In the end, we’ve learned nothing new. Tech companies are driven by growth at all costs, and AI is a means to that end, helping the biggest ones tighten their control and power. It’s not a noble cause, and hasn’t been since the big boys took over. Adverts are shitty and damage the Internet experience, yet they continue to entrench themselves into everything we interact with. Sam Altman excels in his role as Chief Bullshit Officer, saying one thing yet doing the opposite. His company is struggling and edging closer to collapsing or being bought by Microsoft or Google and stripped for parts. Users will complain, and then likely do nothing. AI is still a product that just works fine, that doesn’t make enough money, and isn’t going to bring the societal transformations it once promised, at least not in its current form. 

And most of all, the enshittification will never end.