Yea, the response really sounds ultra defensive, almost like Anthropic nailed exactly what they're planning to do, and it's now Damage Control time...

Yeah I just don't think the average person is going to even get what they are talking about and they may not really care about ads in exchange for free-to-use ChatGPT. Most ChatGPT users are just using it as a search and summary tool. And they were seeing ads before via Google so what difference does it make?

While the Anthropic ads might be a hit amongst nerds, it won't compel normies to use Claude over ChatGPT, and in fact, it may just be damaging to AI adoption overall as it presents bad taste examples of how corruptible it all is.

Counterpoint being that Slack, for example, for all its faults, does not have ads in its chats.

If Anthropic is positioned as "thing for professionals to do professional work" then I think you just avoid this issue entirely. Fee for service. OpenAI trying to be the thing everyone is using won't work in that model, though.

Member when today's biggest advertising company used to claim no ads as their USP? Tegridy members...

It signals a commitment which will help me make a decision.

I do pay extra for privacy and quality.

Enshittified LLMs are not something I’m interested in.