OpenAI plans Start testing ads inside ChatGPT in the coming weeks, a significant change for one of the world’s most widely used AI products. The company announced Friday that initial ad tests will be launched in the United States before expanding globally.
OpenAI says that ads will not influence ChatGPT’s responses, and all ads will appear in separate, clearly labeled boxes directly below the chatbot’s responses. For example, if a user asks ChatGPT for help planning a trip to New York City, they’ll still get a standard reply from the chatbot, and then they may also see an ad for a hotel in the area.
“People rely on ChatGPT for many important and personal tasks, so as we introduce ads, it’s important that we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place,” wrote Fidzi Simo, CEO of OpenAI Applications, in a blog post announcing the ad test. “This means you need to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by something objectively useful, not advertising.”
The first ads will appear for logged-in users on ChatGPIT’s free tier as well as its $8 per month Go tier, which will begin rolling 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 that guide its approach to advertising.
The company says it will not sell user data or expose 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 by advertisements across much of the Internet.
Instead, an OpenAI spokesperson told WIRED that the company will let advertisers see overall 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 ads. Some of a user’s personalization data may be used in that process, the spokesperson said, but the company says users can turn off data being used for advertising without turning off ChatGPT’s other personalization features.
The spokesperson declined to specify what data OpenAI would collect from users to show relevant ads, but ChatGPT already collects a lot 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 customize responses, and OpenAI has expanded the product’s memory features over the past year so that Chatbots can reference prior chats in their responses. The company said in its blog post that “users can clear data used for ads at any time.”
