ChatGPT Announces Ads Coming for Free and Go Users

OpenAI has announced it’ll be incorporating ads into ChatGPT for Free and Go users in the future.

OpenAI states that it won’t sell your data or share your conversations with advertisers, but there’s going to be an option to start a conversation with an ad and that will be shared with advertis

If you choose to message an advertiser through an ad (for example, to ask questions while making a purchase decision), the advertiser will only see the messages you send them directly.

So be careful which messages you respond to I suppose.

The ads will be clearly labeled as ads thankfully, and they won’t affect the answers you get from ChatGPT.

There will be ad personalization which you can turn off, but that brings questions of what data ChatGPT is going to be collecting in order to facilitate that feature. After all, they only promise not to share data with advertisers, not collect it for themselves.

ChatGPT lacks privacy features to keep your chats private to just you. They don’t implement E2EE for your chat history like Proton’s Lumo, they don’t use confidential computing like Confer, and they don’t use homomorphic encryption (although I’m not aware of any chatbots that do currently).

ChatGPT has promised that they want to implement some kind of encryption to chats, although so far we haven’t heard any news of it.

Our long-term roadmap includes advanced security features designed to keep your data private, including client-side encryption for your messages with ChatGPT.

This seems to run counter to their new plans for advertising. After all, how do you serve relevant ads without any data?

To start, we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.

The example of an ad they show is quite intrusive as well, taking up about a third of the screen space. It’s unclear how this feature will interact with adblockers or if ChatGPT will take measures to block adblockers like YouTube has been trying to for years now. Likely they’ll be served from the same domain as regular ChatGPT so it will be more difficult to block them than most ads on the internet.

It seems ChatGPT is reaching stage 2 of Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification process. First, ChatGPT offered its service for free to lure users in. Now, it will make the user experience worse with ads in order to draw in money from advertisers.

With ChatGPT’s precedent set, I think we can expect to see more and more AI services displaying ads in the chat window in the future.