OpenAI caught heat after ChatGPT started pushing Peloton to a paying subscriber who was talking about something completely different, and the guy paid 200 bucks monthly for the Pro Plan. Yuchen Jin from Hyperbolic posted screenshots showing the chatbot randomly suggesting fitness apps during an unrelated podcast discussion, and his post blew up with half a million views from annoyed users.
The company insists these are app discovery experiments rather than actual advertisements, but people pointed out that recommending paid services still feels like ads when you cannot turn them off. OpenAI tried launching an app platform to surface useful tools during conversations, except the execution landed more like annoying product placement than helpful suggestions.
The feature stays in testing mode for most regions while the team fixes how aggressively ChatGPT recommends third-party apps.
The company insists these are app discovery experiments rather than actual advertisements, but people pointed out that recommending paid services still feels like ads when you cannot turn them off. OpenAI tried launching an app platform to surface useful tools during conversations, except the execution landed more like annoying product placement than helpful suggestions.
The feature stays in testing mode for most regions while the team fixes how aggressively ChatGPT recommends third-party apps.
