Hitzig did not call advertising itself immoral. Instead, she argued that the nature of the data at stake makes ChatGPT ads especially risky. Users have shared medical fears, relationship problems, and religious beliefs with the chatbot, she wrote, often “because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda.” She called this accumulated record of personal disclosures “an archive of human candor that has no precedent.”
Even though previously existing data harvesting is invasive, this really does take it to another level.