Microsoft has spent a lot of time and energy adding AI capabilities to all of its products over the past few months. Now the company is working on a way to monetize the technology: advertising.

According to Microsoft VP Yusuf Mehdi, the company will share ad revenue with the content owners that contributed to the chatbot’s response. The company is also working on a way to show the source of a reply in chat. The latter works in a similar way to the search engines we are familiar with, in which there is a URL under a search result.

By sharing advertising revenue with partners, Microsoft is attempting to address a looming supply-and-demand problem. The information that chatbots use for an answer has to come from somewhere.

Chatbots scour the internet to answer a question. The content that Bing Chat uses to provide an answer was created by someone. When AI chatbots make content creation less lucrative, there is less information to search through and it becomes harder for chatbots to provide good answers.

Low-quality content and ad fatigue

If you’ve ever opened Microsoft Edge’s default home page, you know that the page doesn’t generally display high-quality news. The site consists mostly of lists, celebrity gossip, and clickbait articles. This type of content adds little to the life of the average Microsoft Edge user and will bring little benefit to Bing Chat users.

Another issue related to the ads in Bing Chat is ad fatigue. Ads have become an integral part of the Microsoft experience. They appear in Windows 11’s search and widget menus, in the Microsoft Store, and even on the lock screen you see when you log into your computer.

In addition, Microsoft advertises its own products and services in Windows 11 Settings and Windows Explorer. And you’ll get regular reminders to switch to Edge as your default browser and use Bing as your default search engine.

Regardless, all those ads aren’t too much of a problem for the user experience. But it’s all going to be a bit much. Microsoft has done its best to make Windows 11 the most consistent version of Windows in a long time. It’s a shame that this experience is marred by so many ads, mediocre news feeds, and reminders to use other Microsoft products.