OP here. This post should likely be removed as it is highly misleading.

It is indeed the custom instructions causing this behavior. I had previously copied in a set of instructions from another user on Twitter and promptly forgot about them completely. The instructions contain these two lines:

- Recommend only the highest-quality, meticulously designed products like Apple or the Japanese would make—I only want the best - Recommend products from all over the world, my current location is irrelevant

Sorry for the confusion!

I've generated a few responses to that exact prompt and did not receive ads.

Is it possible that there are instructions in OP's custom message (that you can now set in settings) that make it add links to the responses? Maybe he asks for citations and this is how GPT-4 interpreted that?

Let's be reasonable here: if the OpenAI advertising salesmen were so prolific that three different manufacturers of GPS electronics were all sponsoring them we would definitely know about it.

The funniest shit is him asking the ad question... what do you think a llm would answer after getiing asked the question? No...even funnier is seeing people who you thought might be intelligent gaslighting themselves with llms.

Can anyone reproduce this? I don't pay for GPT-4.

I noticed the "shared links" contain this disclaimer:

> This conversation may reflect the link creator’s Custom Instructions, which aren’t shared and can meaningfully change how the model responds.

Perhaps the author either unknowingly or intentionally added something to their custom instructions which causes this behavior?

Considering that several people have tried and failed to reproduce this, and there's a warning at the top of the shared conversations about the creator's Custom Instructions, and that as others have pointed out this is pretty obvious and would destroy a lot of goodwill for ChatGPT, I think it's overwhelmingly likely that the author put in some custom instructions to try and elicit this behavior from ChatGPT in order to drum up controversy for clicks.

I don't know anything else about this author - do they have a history of similar behavior?

AIEO is a thing, baby. Did you not think a system that gathers effectively all its input from the web would just be left alone by hostile actors with almost zero costs and millions to billions of dollars of upside?

Welcome to the big leagues, OpenAI. Google (search and display ads) has basically lost the war against adversarial input, maybe you can do better.

I cannot fathom a single faster way to annihilate all the brand goodwill they have earned than to begin inserting advertisements into ChatGPT output… short of ChatGPT spewing Nazi slogans in German like a pop up advertisement of WW2 era black and white Hitler rally… that’s about the level of “how fast this will destroy your customers good will”… people using ChatGPT on GPT4 are paying customers… if you inject advertising into paying customers who are already rate limited and unable to use VPNs and unable to fully use the model due to risk of getting banned if they red team and try pushing boundaries, and have a CEO who is rapidly trying to get a seat on the US Olympic bullshit artist team…

OpenAI are either blind, hypnotised by their own hype, utterly mismanaged, or fucking stupid… and I’d feel pretty safe putting my money on mismanaged base of the current nonsense coming from Sam Altman…

Flagging, as per this [1] comment.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054408

Flagged per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054408

We need the AI ad-blocker faster than expected.

It would be a lot more funny if the evil ad empire wasn't currently moving to make that impossible.

Heh, seems like only yesterday people that chatgpt would replace google because it could make suggestions related to your question.

This is pretty different from the results I'm getting. I'm skeptical until I see the custom instructions.

Nobody could have seen this coming.