OpenAI Starts Showing Ads to ChatGPT Free and ChatGPT Go Subscribers in the US

OpenAI recently revealed its plans to start showing ads to ChatGPT users. On Monday, the Sam Altman-led AI firm announced that it has started testing ads in its AI-powered chatbot. Initially, the test pilot is being rolled out in one market. However, the tech firm later plans to roll out the same in other regions. These ads will only be shown to free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers. The company claims that a ChatGPT user's conversations will be kept private from advertisers. Notably, on January 16, the ChatGPT Go subscription tier was made available to all regions where the chatbot is present.

OpenAI's Ads on ChatGPT Free, ChatGPT Go Currently Limited to the US

In a blog post, the US-based AI firm announced that it has started the test pilot for showing commercials to ChatGPT free and Go users in the US. The AI giant highlighted that a user's conversations, prompts, and other interactions will not be shared with advertisers. OpenAI recommends that users upgrade to relatively costlier tiers to stop seeing commercials. Free users also have the option to opt out of seeing ads “in exchange for fewer daily free” prompts.

OpenAI further added that the Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscription tiers will not include commercials. The company claims that the advertised suggestions “do not influence” the ChatGPT's AI-generated responses.

The AI giant cited “significant infrastructure and ongoing investment” as the reasons behind bringing ads to its chatbot, which is said to fund the work the company does, while also allowing it to offer broader ChatGPT access to users.

Commercials in ChatGPT will “always” be clearly labelled as sponsored answers, while also being “visually separated from the organic answer”, allowing users to differentiate between the two, OpenAI added. During the test pilot, the AI giant will match ads submitted by advertisers with the topic of the user's conversation, their chat history, and other past interactions.

For example, if a user is asking for a dish's recipe, ChatGPT will display ads for meal kits and grocery delivery. In case there are multiple advertisers for the same product or service, the Sam Altman-led firm said that the AI chatbot will select the commercials based on what is most relevant to the person, and place them at the top.

Lastly, users can also dismiss an ad, share feedback on it, read why and how a particular commercial is being shown to them, delete their ad data, and manage ad personalisation.

This comes soon after the company's competitor, Anthropic, mocked OpenAI in a series of commercials saying that ChatGPT has ads but Claude, Anthropic's offering, does not. To this, Sam Altman replied, calling Anthropic's Super Bowl ad campaign deceptive and dishonest.