Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has released a Super Bowl ad campaign poking fun at ads in chatbot results, prompting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to label the television spots “clearly dishonest” about sponsored content in ChatGPT.
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Anthropic on Thursday published four-minute-long promos online, each imagining a conversation that takes a bizarre turn.
In one ad, a man asks his therapist for tips on how to reconnect with his mother, only for the specialist to recommend a dating app populated by older women.
In another, a young woman asking a ‘friend’ for tips on how to launch a small business faces a dangerous suggestion: taking out an expensive variable-interest loan.
“Ads are coming to AI,” the ads read, “but not to Claude,” Anthropic’s chatbot and primary ChatGPT competitor.
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The promos, which will appear on US television during the Super Bowl LX broadcast on Monday morning, set Anthropic apart from OpenAI, which last month confirmed adverts will soon appear in ChatGPT results.
Those using ChatGPT’s free and low-price Go tiers will see ads in their results, with no ads on display for Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers.
Advertising will open a new revenue stream for OpenAI, which expects to burn US$115 billion (AU$165 billion) in cash by 2029.
Anthropic takes a different view.
In a new blog post accompanying the promo campaign, Anthropic said what users want from a chatbot conversation, and what advertisers want to sell, are often misaligned.
Keeping Claude ad-free will preserve user trust in the long-run, it added.
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“Expanding access to Claude is central to our public benefit mission, and we want to do it without selling our users’ attention or data to advertisers,” according to the blog.
Speaking to Good Morning America, Anthropic president Daniela Amodei said the new promo campaign “isn’t intended to be about any other company other than us”.
Altman disagreed, taking to Twitter to call the ads “funny” but misguided on how ads will actually appear in ChatGPT.
“We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them,” Altman said Thursday, referring to jarring product recommendations jammed into ‘ordinary’ chatbot conversations.
We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.
Earlier, OpenAI said ads would appear at the bottom of ChatGPT answers “when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation”.
Altman went on, depicting the average Claude subscriber as very different to ChatGPT users.
“Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people,” said Altman (Claude offers basic use for free, but access to its developer tool Claude Code costs up to US$200, or AU$287, a month).
“We are glad they do that and we are doing that too,” Altman continued, “but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions”.
