OpenAI plans to start testing ads inside ChatGPT in the coming weeks, marking a significant shift for one of the world’s most widely used AI products. The company announced Friday that initial ad tests will roll out in the United States before expanding globally.
OpenAI says ads will not influence ChatGPT’s responses, and that all ads will appear in separate, clearly labeled boxes directly below the chatbot’s answer. For instance, if a user asks ChatGPT for help planning a trip to New York City, they will still get a standard answer from the chatbot, and then they also might see an ad for a hotel in the area.
“People trust ChatGPT for many important and personal tasks, so as we introduce ads, it’s crucial we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place,” wrote OpenAI CEO of applications Fidji Simo in a blog post announcing the ad trial. “That means you need to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by what’s objectively useful, never by advertising.”
The first ads will appear for logged-in users on ChatGPT’s free tier, as well as its $8-a-month Go tier, which will begin to roll out to users in the United States on Friday. The Go tier—which is already available in India, France, and other countries—lets users send more messages and generate more images than the free version. OpenAI says users on its Plus, Pro, and Enterprise subscriptions will not see ads.
OpenAI also outlined the principles guiding its approach to advertising.
The company says it will not sell user data or expose conversations with ChatGPT to advertisers. That means advertisers won’t be able to see information about a user’s age, location, or interests; this is often the case when users are targeted with ads across much of the internet.
Instead, an OpenAI spokesperson told WIRED the company will let advertisers see aggregate ad performance metrics, such as how many times an ad was shown in ChatGPT or how many users clicked on it.
To determine which ads it shows people, OpenAI says it will match conversation topics to relevant advertisements. Some of a user’s personalization data may be used in that process, the spokesperson said, but the company says users can turn off the data used for advertising without turning off 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 lots of other data to improve the chatbot’s responses. Users can ask the chatbot to remember personal traits—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 prior chats in its responses. The company says in its blog post that “users can clear the data used for ads at any time.”
OpenAI says there are circumstances in which ads should never appear in ChatGPT, such as conversations on sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health, or politics. OpenAI also says it will not serve ads to users it believes are under 18, either because the user told them so, or an age-prediction model the company plans to roll out soon determined them to be a minor.
OpenAI says it plans to share more about how businesses can advertise within ChatGPT in the coming weeks. Simo suggests in her blog post that the company is exploring more interactive ad experiences within ChatGPT.
“Conversational interfaces create possibilities for people to go beyond static messages and links,” said Simo. “For example, soon you might see an ad and be able to directly ask the questions you need to make a purchase decision.”
The introduction of ads into ChatGPT has long seemed inevitable. The chatbot has quickly grown into one of the largest consumer products on the internet, with more than 800 million weekly active users, the majority of whom never pay OpenAI a dollar. Massive consumer platforms typically have already started building out massive advertising businesses by the time they reach this scale.
OpenAI could use a business like that right about now. The decade-old company has raised roughly $64 billion from investors over its lifetime, and it generated only a fraction of that in revenue last year. Competition from rivals like Google Gemini has only amped up the pressure for OpenAI to monetize ChatGPT’s massive audience.
It seems clear that ads will be a major part of OpenAI’s business moving forward, and Simo will be a key decisionmaker in how they’re rolled out. The key question is how the company can do so without degrading the user experience. Simo acknowledges that tension in her blog post, even suggesting that ads will help the company offer more powerful AI systems to more people. She also says OpenAI does not optimize for time spent in ChatGPT, like many social media apps do, and the company prioritizes “user trust and user experience over revenue.”
While ChatGPT ads are just a trial for now, internet users are all too familiar with the platforms they love speeding down the long winding road to enshittification as business incentives take priority over user experience. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously acknowledged the failures of the social media era, including 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 those mistakes.
The post Ads Are Coming to ChatGPT. Here’s How They’ll Work appeared first on Wired.
