Here come the ads. There goes the trust.

Here come the ads. There goes the trust.

This morning I did some testing, trying to trigger ads on ChatGPT. Despite my overall dislike of ads on any platform (yes, not typical of a marketer, I know!), the ads on ChatGPT seem to be rather benign. It's also worth noting that only free accounts will be served ads, at least initially. However, when using my pro account to suggest summer tee-shirts, ChatGPT did serve up what looked very much like a featured ad with a 'visit' to shop link. Hmmm...with no transparency into why my prompt triggered that specific shopping opportunity, I'm not sure I would trust the results. AND THAT MY FRIENDS IS THE WHOLE POINT.

Anthropic has taken a very strong stance AGAINST ads, which I applaud, and given their valuation it appears to be the right call.

I can see this playing out where ChatGPT becomes more of an AI shopping tool and Claude is the tool where real work gets done. This is how I use both platforms in my own life. ChatGPT will quietly rake in the billions of ad dollars while Anthropic crushes the enterprise AI for work market. Only time will tell, but these radically different approaches to ads will certainly have a MAJOR impact.

🔥 This Week's Hot Takes: AI Marketing Edition

Here come the ads. There goes the trust. (lisapeyton.com). I ran the same three prompts across ChatGPT Pro, free logged-in, free logged-out, and Claude as a control. The ad layer is small and benign on the surface. The trust problem is what's running underneath, where logged-out users get different brand recommendations than logged-in ones and Pro users get shopping cards that aren't ads but function exactly like them. Two products, two business models, one big shift for marketers to plan around.

OpenAI launches self-serve ad platform (Axios). The $50K minimum is gone, CPC bidding is in, and the Ads Manager is now live in beta to U.S. advertisers. OpenAI is targeting $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030. The eligible categories are still narrow (household goods, local services, travel, education), so if you're in one of those, you have a window before everyone else piles in.

Martech 2026: AI drives a major industry reset (MarTech). The martech landscape grew just 0.7% this year, going from 15,384 to 15,505 tools. But that's misleading. Roughly 1,500 tools were added and 1,300 disappeared. SaaS is becoming infrastructure. AI is the new value layer on top, and the stacks that win are built around three to five high-impact use cases, not feature checklists.

Generative AI dominates marketers' minds, the metaverse is collecting dust (eMarketer). 70% of marketers worldwide say genAI is the most important consumer trend they're watching, almost 6x the share tracking the metaverse. Spending follows attention: 79% plan to increase budget on genAI creator content this year. The catch is that 56% of internet users worry AI makes online content less trustworthy. Marketers are leaning in. Audiences aren't sure they want us to.

GPT-5.5 Instant: smarter, clearer, more personalized (OpenAI). The new default model dropped on May 5. OpenAI says it produces 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims on high-stakes prompts in medicine, law, and finance, and 37.3% fewer inaccurate claims on flagged conversations. It also pulls more context from past chats, files, and Gmail if you've connected it. The "memory sources" control lets you see and delete what context shaped a response, which is the part most marketers should actually care about.

The state of generative AI in the creator economy (Digiday). Five months into 2026, AI is fully embedded in creator workflows. Brands are eyeing AI influencers as a way to dodge morality clause risk, but ownership rights are still legally murky and audience trust is the part nobody has solved.

Import AI 455: Automating AI Research (Jack Clark). Anthropic's policy lead Jack Clark puts a 60%+ probability on AI systems autonomously training their successors by the end of 2028. The data is stark: in 2022, AI could handle tasks taking 30 seconds. Today, Opus 4.6 handles tasks that take a human 12 hours. Even if you discount the timeline, the trajectory has direct implications for how fast the tools you use for marketing work are going to keep changing.

Anthropic commits to spending $200 billion on Google's cloud and chips (The Information). Anthropic locked in five years of Google Cloud and TPU capacity for $200B, the concrete dollar figure behind the 5-gigawatt deal announced last month. Alphabet is also investing up to $40B in Anthropic. This is the build-out of the enterprise AI work tool I've been talking about. The supply chain has to be ordered years before the revenue exists to pay for it.

Google makes Gemini's organization tool free for all users globally (Moneycontrol). Gemini Notebooks (the project-organization feature that syncs with NotebookLM) is now free for everyone, including on mobile. Free tier gets 50 sources per notebook, AI Plus gets 100, Pro 300, Ultra 600. If you're already using Claude Projects to organize work, this gives you a serious Google-side equivalent without paying.

Trump considers government oversight of AI models (The New York Times). The administration is reportedly weighing an executive order to create an AI working group of tech executives and government officials to examine oversight procedures for new AI models before release. This builds on the December 2025 directive requiring vendors to measure political bias to sell to federal agencies. Worth tracking if you're in regulated industries or sell to government.

AI moved forward, marketing did not (MarTech). Melissa Reeve names the trap most marketing teams fell into: we adopted AI early, hit a wall when early outputs burned trust, and then never updated our workflow. Eighteen months later, most teams are still typing into a chat box and copy-pasting the result. Meanwhile Claude Sonnet 4.5 can sustain 30+ hour tasks autonomously. The ceiling moved. Most of us didn't.

AI-generated actors and scripts are now ineligible for Oscars (TechCrunch). The Academy ruled that only performances credited in legal billing and performed by humans with consent qualify. Screenplays must be human-authored. The Academy also reserves the right to ask about AI usage in any submission. The line in the sand is moving across creative industries, and brand teams should expect it to show up in client procurement language and IP clauses next.

The state of marketing and AI: direction is the differentiator (The Guardian / Canva). Canva's 2026 report lands on four themes worth marking: AI killed creative friction (the edge is now velocity plus creative direction), meaning beats volume, relevance must be earned (personalization isn't license to be intrusive), and real advantage comes from integration with guardrails, not endless experimentation.

Why brand authority beats topical authority in AI search (Search Engine Land). Andrew Holland makes the case that publishing more content was never the actual definition of authority. Authority is what others say about you, not what you publish about yourself. AI citations are evidence of machine retrieval. Human citations are evidence of market recognition. Different things. The goal isn't to be scraped. It's to be recommended.

🧪 The Alchemist's Lab: Tools I've Been Testing

• Grammarly AI Agents

• Function: Grammarly has come a long way since I tested their AI tools two years ago. They now have a full suite of AI agents that go way beyond grammar checking, including AI Grader, Citation Finder, Reader Reactions, Humanizer, Proofreader, Paraphraser, AI Detector, and Plagiarism Checker. The agents are context-aware, so they read what you're working on and offer feedback without you crafting the perfect prompt.

• Marketing application: The Reader Reactions agent is the one that caught my attention. You can preview how a piece of copy might land with your target audience before you ship it. Pair that with the AI Detector for catching AI-sounding tells in your own drafts and the Citation Finder for fact-checking, and you have a real QA layer for newsletter, blog, and pitch copy. It's the kind of tool that's most useful at the editing stage, not the drafting stage.

• Pricing: Most agents are available on the free plan. Some agents and features are paid only. Plans are listed on grammarly.com/plans.

🤖 Top AI Models for Marketers This Week

This week's rankings are pulled from my weekly brief on the Advanced AI for Marketing Slack channel. Shoot me an email if you want early access. Same story we've been seeing: Claude leads on writing, GPT-5.5 leads on reasoning, Gemini owns vision.

🧠 Most Intelligent — strategic briefs, layered analysis, complex reasoning tasks

1. GPT-5.5 (xhigh) — Intelligence Index 60 — strategic briefs

2. Claude Opus 4.7 (Max Effort) — Intelligence Index 57 — competitive teardowns

3. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview — Intelligence Index 57 — multimodal reasoning

GPT-5.5 took the top intelligence slot back this week, but Claude and Gemini are within three points. For most marketing work, that's a tie. I keep all three open and pick by job, not by score.

Source: Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

✍️ Creative Writing — long-form essays, narrative case studies, brand storytelling

1. Claude Opus 4.7 — EQ-Bench Elo 2216 — narrative case studies

2. GPT-5.5 — EQ-Bench Elo 2024 — long-form essays

3. GPT-5.4 — EQ-Bench Elo 2019 — brand voice

Claude's lead on creative writing has held for months now. If you're writing thought leadership, case studies, or anything that needs voice, this is the model.

Source: EQ-Bench Creative Writing v3

📝 Copywriting — landing pages, ad variants, product descriptions, email subject lines

1. Claude Opus 4.7 — evy.so #1 — landing page heroes

2. GPT-5.5 — evy.so #2 — A/B variants

3. Claude Sonnet 4.6 — evy.so #3 — product descriptions

Claude takes #1 and #3 on copy this week. The Sonnet placement is the one to watch. Sonnet is faster and cheaper than Opus, and for product descriptions at scale that math matters.

Source: evy.so writing aggregate (refreshes weekly, newer models may be missing)

👁️ Vision — chart extraction, dashboard analysis, slide transcription, image-to-copy workflows

1. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview — MMMU-Pro 82% — chart extraction

2. GPT-5.5 (high) — MMMU-Pro 81% — dashboard analysis

3. Gemini 3 Pro Preview — MMMU-Pro 80% — slide transcription

Gemini owns vision. For research reports with charts, slide decks, or any image-to-text workflow, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview is the move.

Source: AA Visual Reasoning Index

🎓 AI Marketing Master Class Moment

AI for Marketing: How to Audit Your Content Strategy with AI with me, Friday May 8, 4:00 PM UTC, free Lightning Lesson on Maven.

I'm going to demo the latest tools for AI content audits and a three layer framework to ensuring your content marketing strategy is bullet proof.

You'll walk away with three concrete builds: an AI companion for honest audience-resonance feedback, a workflow for using agentic browsers to audit your published content at scale, and a way to combine qualitative and quantitative findings into a real action plan.

📊 The Number That Made Me Spill My Green Tea

$100 billion

That’s OpenAI’s reported ad revenue target by 2030. Not total revenue. Ad revenue. If that number is even directionally right, ChatGPT is not just becoming a search competitor. It’s becoming a paid discovery environment with conversational trust wrapped around it.

🏆 My Take: What This Means for Your Marketing

The big story this week is trust. Ads, AI slop, model vetting, creator disclosure, brand authority, and AI search are all the same conversation wearing different outfits.

Action item: Run three prompts this week where a customer might ask an AI tool to recommend your category. Track which brands show up, which sources get cited, and whether your brand appears at all. If you’re invisible there, your content strategy has a new job.

Before You Go

Hit reply and tell me: what's your biggest AI marketing challenge right now?

I read every response, and it helps shape future newsletters.

That's a wrap on this week's AI marketing alchemy. Keep experimenting, keep transforming, and remember: true magic happens when we blend AI efficiency with human creativity.

Crafted with passion and a dash of AI alchemy by Lisa Peyton
AI Practitioner, Professor, and Pioneer

Let's connect: https://linktr.ee/lisapeyton

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