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.
Photograph: Courtesy of OpenAI
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.”