Op-ed: Ads are Coming to AI chats. Behold as the Internet is Ruined All Over Again
This op-ed, authored by CDT’s Miranda Bogen, first appeared in The Globe and Mail on April 8, 2026. A portion of the text has been pasted below.
When I first learned of OpenAI’s plans to add advertisements to ChatGPT, my heart sank, but I can’t say I was surprised. At the end of March, the company announced it would expand on its initial pilot to test ads in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and hired Dave Dugan, a former Meta advertising executive, to lead ad sales, suggesting that momentum toward a broader rollout is growing.
Before taking my current role at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington-based non-profit focused on civil rights and civil liberties, I worked at Meta as the company was investing in increasingly sophisticated ways to deliver ads to its billions of users, and the news of ads’ arrival in AI systems felt eerily familiar. Like most frontier AI companies (and like social media companies before them), OpenAI faces mounting pressure to justify immense investments in computing infrastructure, energy production and other operating costs, with subscription revenue covering only a fraction. Tech company employees have lots of different opinions about how their products work, but at the end of the day it’s economic incentives that shape the tools.
Will the Open Internet Survive the War on Bots? Mapping the Debate Over “AI Preferences”
When should individuals and organizations be able to use automated tools or “bots” to collect data from or interact with openly published websites — whether we call it “scraping”, “crawling,” or simply automated data collection?
Can Generative Intermediaries Deliver When It Comes to Information Quality?
LLM-powered systems are mediating what people know and believe, the decisions they make, their ability to participate in democracy, and their ability to access trustworthy information on the issues that matter most to them.
How Policymakers Can Address AI Auditing and Assessment Requirements
As more state policymakers consider third-party AI auditing or assessment requirements, these policies face important challenges to their effectiveness.
The FTC’s proposed framework wrongly treats standard technical steps that are needed to train AI models, and ensure they are accurate, reliable, fair, and safe, as potential “deceptive steering” away from an assumed “neutral” baseline.
