ChatGPT users are about to get hit with targeted ads

An ongoing conversation — both within and outside of the tech community — has been about just how and when OpenAI, which is currently valued at $500 billion, will make money. Well, there’s one surefire way to do that, and that is through advertising. In the near term, that seems to be the AI giant’s plan, as it announced this week that limited ads are headed to certain ChatGPT users.

In a blog post published Friday, OpenAI said that it will begin testing ads in the U.S. for both its free and Go tiers. (Go accounts, which cost $8 a month, were introduced globally on Friday.) The company frames this as a way to sustain free access while generating revenue from people who aren’t ready to commit to a paid subscription. For the time being, the company’s more expensive paid tiers — Pro, Plus, Business, and Enterprise — will not be getting any ads.

The 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 situation, as they’ll be able to dismiss ads, see explanations for why they’re being shown particular ones, and also turn off personalization, which should defeat the ads’ targeted nature. The company has also made a commitment not to serve ads to users it believes are under the age of 18.

OpenAI says that ChatGPT will maintain “answer independence,” meaning that, despite the incorporation of advertising, those ads will not influence the answers that the chatbot serves to users. The company has also promised not to sell users’ data to advertisers.

This strategy could pay off in two ways. For users of the free and Go tiers, the company obviously stands to make a significant amount of ad revenue. At the same time, there will necessarily be certain users who appreciate the app but don’t appreciate the ads, which could conceivably drive an uptick in subscriptions to the platform’s more expensive accounts.

OpenAI also wants everybody to know that it’s only sticking ads in its chatbot to help the world. In its blog post Friday, the company promised that its “pursuit of advertising is always in support of” its mission: that AGI “benefits all of humanity.”