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- AI with Kyle Daily Update 137
AI with Kyle Daily Update 137
Today in AI: ChatGPT wants you to love ads
Kyle Balmer
February 11, 2026
What’s happening in the world of AI:
Highlights
ChatGPT Now Has Adverts (And They Really Want You to Love Them!)
It's happened. OpenAI started rolling out ads in ChatGPT for Free and Go tier users in the US.
What's fascinating is the spin. OpenAI aren't just announcing ads. They're trying to convince everyone that ads are actually good for them. They've launched a whole podcast episode about it. The messaging is: this allows us to bring free AI to billions of people, ads won't influence answers, they'll be clearly labelled, visually separated, and you're going to find them helpful.
I agree with this mission. And I think it’s fair for OpenAI to ad advertising. It allows them to provide ChatGPT to 1 billion people for free. That’s HUGE.
BUT…just say that. Don’t also tell people that actually this is going to be great for you and you’ll find the adverts helpful. That they’ll actually make ChatGPT better for you dear user.
That’s nonsense. We know it. You know it. Be honest: hey, you aren’t paying so you get ads. That’s the deal.
They also claim ads won't influence the answers. Fine. But the whole point of showing you an advert for an enchilada kit at the bottom of your recipe conversation is to influence your behaviour! That's what advertising does! It’s why we do it! The answer stays the same, sure, but they're still pushing a product at you in a moment when you're making a decision. Saying "ads don't influence the answer" is technically true but deliberately misses the point.
Just remember if you're using ChatGPT for free, you are not the customer.
You are the product.
Your attention, your clicks, your data are being sold to the actual customers, which are the advertisers. This is the same deal Google has had for decades: free service, you get ads, they get revenue. That's fine, it's honest. We get it.
Over 90% of ChatGPT's 800 million weekly users are on free or Go tiers, and that infrastructure costs a fortune. But don't tell me I'm going to love it. Just be straight about it.
The interesting bit is what comes next. OpenAI are now the guinea pig. They'll make all the mistakes, deal with all the memes, work through all the embarrassing ad placements. And then in a year or two, Google will quietly add ads to Gemini and nobody will bat an eyelid because the precedent's been set.
Higgsfield Got Suspended from X (And Probably Deserved It)
Higgsfield AI, the AI image and video generation company, had their X account suspended for violating platform rules. Every repost, every promotional tweet, gone. Oopsie.
Full disclosure: Higgsfield approached me for a paid sponsorship. I said no, for a few reasons. I don't do many sponsored posts. I only promote products I actually use. And I'm not that interested in AI image generation as a category. My focus is on AI for productivity and building businesses, not generating slop. So it was an easy no, even if it was thousands of pounds.
Turns out I dodged a bullet. Higgsfield were paying influencers and content creators to post about their product without disclosing it was paid. That's already a problem under advertising rules.
They were also using AI-generated likenesses of celebrities in their promotional material, some of it bordering on pornographic, with actors from shows like Stranger Things and Game of Thrones in suggestive scenarios using deepfakes. On top of that, they were bragging publicly about destroying creative jobs, which went down about as well as you'd expect.
And finally…(phew, long list)… they weren't even paying the creators they'd hired. They'd agree a deal, the creator would post, and then Higgsfield would ghost them, remove the deal, or stop responding to emails. Several people in my content creator group confirmed this.
Kyle's take: Good riddance! There are genuinely useful AI companies building products that help people be more productive and build businesses. Then there are companies like Higgsfield that generate slop, use stolen likenesses, stiff their partners, and damage the reputation of the entire industry in the process. Every time a company like this makes headlines, it makes it harder for the people doing good work with AI. One fewer of them is fine by me.
I shall not shed any tears!
AI.com: Peak Bubble Energy
This might be the single most absurd thing I've covered. The CEO of Crypto.com, Kris Marszalek, bought the domain ai.com for $70 million (paid entirely in crypto, naturally). He then spent about $10 million on a Super Bowl advert telling people to "claim your handle." The site crashed instantly on Cloudflare with a 504 gateway error.
When it finally came back up, here's what you got: a page that asks you to connect your Google account (the only sign-up method), immediately requests your credit card to "verify you're human," and describes itself as being "on a mission to accelerate the arrival of AGI by building a decentralized network of autonomous self-improving AI agents that perform real world tasks for the good of humanity." Wut?
They managed to get every single AI and Web3 buzzword into one sentence. All they needed was "metaverse" for the full bingo card…
The product, from what people have worked out, appears to be an OpenClaw wrapper with some kind of trading functionality bolted on. Maybe? It’s unclear.
And now it looks like Google has blocked ai.com's authentication request for not complying with their policies. So you literally cannot sign up any more…
Kyle's take: Crypto guy with no AI background buys the most expensive domain in history, burns $10 million on a Super Bowl ad, builds what appears to be a vibe-coded wrapper around someone else's open-source project, asks for your credit card before showing you what the product does, crashes on launch, and gets blocked by Google. This is what peak AI bubble looks like. If you gave them your credit card details, I'd be keeping a very close eye on your statements. Stay away from this one please and thank you!
Source: Adweek coverage, IBTimes deep dive, Tom's Hardware
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