We’re calling ads something else now.
Instinct, a fast-growing AI agent competing with Meta’s Muse, has introduced what it calls Instinct Selections. According to founder Noah Shinn in a post on X (hat tip to TechCrunch), these are curated “world-class recommendations that are differentiated in quality from what you might find on the internet, and from what other chatbots produce.”
Sounds nice. But they also sound a lot like ads.
Why This Matters:
Instinct Selections is a play at bringing shopping into the AI agent experience. The idea is to surface relevant products and services based on what users are discussing with the agent, potentially making product discovery feel more natural and useful.
But there’s also an advertising angle here, even if the business model isn’t entirely clear. We don’t yet know whether brands are paying for placement, how they’re selected or what commercial arrangements might exist. Still, these are promotions for products and services, even if they’re more carefully curated than traditional ads.
Shinn’s emphasis on recommendations being “differentiated in quality” from other chatbots also feels like a pointed reference to ChatGPT’s advertising ambitions. Instinct appears to be positioning curation and quality as differentiators, rather than opening its platform to a broad range of advertisers. Whether that translates into a better experience remains to be seen.
Experts React:
Some Instinct users have reacted critically to the introduction of Selections, which is currently available through early access.
Others see more nuance in the approach — and potential value in recommendations that are actually well curated.
Our Take:
There’s a lesson here from OpenAI, and it’s about transparency.
After years of Sam Altman expressing reservations about ads, OpenAI embraced it. But the company was upfront about its plans, publicly discussing it, outlining ad principles and explaining how it intended to protect the ChatGPT experience.
That didn’t mean everyone welcomed ads, of course. But at least users knew they were coming.
Instinct has taken a different approach, introducing something that resembles advertising without explicitly calling it that — and seemingly out of the blue. Judging by some early reactions, that isn’t necessarily going over well. People will always treat conversational AI very differently than other ad surfaces.
