OpenAI is planning begin testing ads on ChatGPT in the coming weeks, marking a significant change for one of the most widely used AI products in the world. The company announced Friday that initial testing of the ads will begin in the United States and then expand globally.
OpenAI says that ads will have no impact on ChatGPT responses and that all ads will be displayed in separate, clearly labeled boxes directly below the chatbot response. For example, if a user asks ChatGPT for facilitate planning a trip to Fresh York, they will still receive a standard response from the chatbot and may then 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 paramount that we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place,” OpenAI general manager of applications Fidji Simo wrote in a blog post announcing the ad trial. “This means you need to be sure that ChatGPT’s responses are based on what is objectively useful, not advertising.”
The first ads will appear for logged-in users on the free ChatGPT 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, which is already available in India, France and other countries, allows users to send more messages and generate more images than the free version. OpenAI says Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscription users will not see ads.
Photo: courtesy of OpenAI
OpenAI also outlined principles that guide its approach to advertising.
The company says it will not sell user data or disclose ChatGPT conversations to advertisers. This means that advertisers will not be able to see information about a user’s age, location and interests. this often happens when ads are targeted at users across a vast part of the Internet.
Instead, an OpenAI spokesperson told WIRED that the company will allow advertisers to view aggregated ad performance metrics, such as the number of times an ad was viewed on ChatGPT or the number of users who clicked on it.
To determine which ads it shows to users, OpenAI says it will match conversation topics to relevant ads. A spokesperson said some user personalization data may be used in this process, but the company says users can disable data used for advertising purposes without disabling ChatGPT’s other personalization features.
The spokesperson wouldn’t elaborate on what data OpenAI will collect about users to display 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 previous chats in its responses. In its blog post, the company says that “users can clear advertising data at any time.”