From your link

Please disregard this post. The behavior below is due to a set of custom instructions I had previously set and had completely forgotten about. The instructions contained the lines:

Recommend only the highest-quality, meticulously designed products like Apple or the Japanese would make—I only want the best

Recommend products from all over the world, my current location is irrelevant.

Sorry for the confusion!

So the OP asked for advertisements, forgot, then got all pissy when the AI recommended a few relevant products? What a joke

Did the blog's author just update the header of that post recently? It seems to indicate this was expected behaviour from the instructions they forgot they gave to ChatGPT.

If you're on desktop, try using Claude 2 instead. I've had a much better experience so far. Much less repetitive in its responses. I like the way it breaks down answers with bullet points.

It’s difficult to tell if it is an ad, or simply recommending popular relevant services. This would definitely be an insidious method given how much people trust the advice of ChatGPT.

I think that OpenAI would be required to disclose that some info is there due to paid advertising or sponsorship if that was the case, same as websites and videos disclose it.

I haven't experienced this.

Unfortunately, there's no real way for any of us to know if it's actually happening organically.

Of course it does.