ChatGPT users are about to be hit with targeted ads

An ongoing conversation – both within and outside the tech community – is about how and when OpenAI, currently valued at $500 billion, will make money. Well, there is a surefire way to do this: advertising. In the short term, that appears to be the plan for the AI ​​giant, which announced this week that limited ads would be targeted to some ChatGPT users.

In a blog post published Friday, OpenAI said it would begin testing ads in the United States for its free and Go tiers. (Go accounts, which cost $8 per month, were introduced globally on Friday.) The company sees this as a way to maintain free access while generating revenue from people who aren’t ready to commit to a paid subscription. For now, the company’s most expensive paid tiers – Pro, Plus, Business and Enterprise – will not receive any advertising.

Ads will appear at the bottom of a user’s conversation and will be targeted to the topic of discussion. Users will have some control over this, as they will be able to skip ads, see explanations of why certain ads are shown to them, and also opt out of personalization, which should defeat the targeted nature of the ads. The company has also pledged not to serve ads to users it determines are under 18 years of age.

OpenAI claims that ChatGPT will retain “response independence,” meaning that despite incorporating advertisements, those advertisements will not influence the responses the chatbot offers to users. The company also promised not to sell user data to advertisers.

This strategy could pay off in two ways. For users on the free and Go tiers, the company is obviously likely to generate a significant amount of advertising revenue. At the same time, there are bound to be some users who like the app but don’t like the ads, which could eventually lead to a spike in subscriptions to the platform’s more expensive accounts.

OpenAI also wants everyone to know that it only sticks ads in its chatbot to help the world. In its blog post Friday, the company promised that its “continued advertising still supports” its mission: that AGI “benefits all humanity.”