For example every product mention (snapple, oh henry candy bars, jr mints) on Seinfeld was an ad. The skit is written, but any product can be dropped in. If no advertisers are interested, made up names are used.
This has been going on for 100+ years, including radio.
Why would ChatGPT be special?
Legislation has to be interpreted by courts, and there is surely lots of caselaw. I'd look there, as to why it is OK.
Regardless, is there a ToS you agreed to, that disclosess it will happen? TV doesn't have a ToS nor a movie theater, yet ChatGPT can have one.
One last thing... openai pulled off the largest, unlicensed use of copyright material ever, and is fine.
Meanwhile, TV already has embedded ads...
Yeah, so?
To my knowledge there is absolutely no legal precedent for one company simply paying to have themselves more heavily weighted in the training data. So it just happens that they show up more in responses then their competitors.
I understand that there are a lot of strong opinions and open questions about OpenAI behavior – the amount of vigilantism is quite staggering – but if what they do is found to be clearly illegal by courts around the world, they will have to pay very hefty fines. Disguising ads is one such move. That's just not a winning business.