OpenAI plans to start testing ads inside ChatGPT in the coming weeks, marking a significant change for one of the countries most used AI products. The company announced Friday that initial ad testing would be rolled out in the United States before expanding globally.
OpenAI indicates that advertisements will not influence ChatGPT’s responses and that all advertisements will appear in separate, clearly labeled boxes directly below the chatbot’s response. For example, if a user asks ChatGPT for help plan a trip to New Yorkthey will still receive a standard response from the chatbot, and they may also see an ad for a hotel in the area.
“People trust ChatGPT for many important and personal tasks, so when we introduce ads, it’s crucial to preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place,” wrote Fidji Simo, CEO of OpenAI applications in a blog post announcing the ad trial. “This means you need to be sure that ChatGPT responses are driven by what is objectively useful, never by advertising.”
The first ads will appear for logged in users on ChatGPT’s free tier, as well as the $8 per month Go tier, which will begin rolling out to users in the United States on Friday. The Go tier, already available in India, France and other countries, allows users to send more messages and generate more images than the free version. OpenAI says users on its Plus, Pro, and Enterprise subscriptions won’t see ads.
Photography: Courtesy of OpenAI
OpenAI also outlined the principles that guide its approach to advertising.
The company says it will not sell user data or reveal conversations with ChatGPT to advertisers. This means that advertisers will not be able to see information about a user’s age, location, or interests; this is often the case when users are targeted with advertisements across a large part of the Internet.
Instead, an OpenAI spokesperson told WIRED that the company will allow advertisers to see aggregate ad performance metrics, such as how many times an ad has been shown in ChatGPT or how many users have clicked on it.
To determine which ads it shows people, OpenAI says it will match conversation topics to relevant ads. Some of a user’s personalization data may be used in this process, the spokesperson said, but the company says users can opt out of data used for advertising purposes without opting out of ChatGPT’s other personalization features.
The spokesperson declined to detail exactly what data OpenAI will collect on users to serve relevant ads, but ChatGPT already collects plenty of other data to improve the chatbot’s responses. Users can ask the chatbot to remember personal characteristics, such as hobbies, dietary restrictions and other preferences, to tailor responses, and OpenAI has expanded the product’s memory features over the past year so that ChatGPT can reference past discussions in its responses. The company states in its blog post that “users can erase data used for ads at any time.”
OpenAI says there are circumstances where ads should never appear in ChatGPT, such as conversations about sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health, or politics. OpenAI also says it won’t serve ads to users it determines are under 18, either because the user told them so or because an age prediction model the company plans to roll out soon determined they were minors.
OpenAI says it plans to share more about how businesses can advertise in ChatGPT in the coming weeks. Simo suggests in his blog post that the company is exploring more interactive ad experiences within ChatGPT.
“Conversational interfaces allow users to go beyond static messages and links,” Simo said. “For example, you might soon see an ad and be able to directly ask the questions you need to make a purchasing decision.”
The introduction of advertisements in ChatGPT has long seemed inevitable. The chatbot has quickly become one of the largest consumer products on the Internet, with more than 800 million weekly active users, the majority of whom never pay a dollar to OpenAI. Consumer platforms have typically already started building massive advertising businesses by the time they reach this scale.
OpenAI could use a company like that right now. The decade-old company has raised about $64 billion from investors over its lifetime, and generated only a fraction of that in revenue last year. Competition from rivals like Google Gemini has only increased the pressure on OpenAI to monetize ChatGPT’s massive audience.
It seems clear that ads will be a significant part of OpenAI’s business in the future, and Simo will be a key decision-maker in how they will be deployed. The key question is how the company can achieve this without degrading the user experience. Simo acknowledges this tension in his blog post, even suggesting that the ads will help the company bring more powerful AI systems to more people. She also says that OpenAI doesn’t optimize time spent in ChatGPT, as many social media apps do, and that the company prioritizes “trust and user experience over revenue.”
While ChatGPT ads are still just a trial, people are all too familiar with the platforms they love accelerate the long winding path towards ensitification because commercial incentives take priority over user experience. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously acknowledged failures of the social media eraincluding the negative effects that addictive algorithms have had on society. As ads evolve in ChatGPT over the coming years, the challenge for OpenAI will be to not repeat these mistakes.
