SAN FRANCISCO — ChatGPT creator OpenAI has officially announced it will start showing advertisements to people who aren’t premium paid subscribers soon.
The giant artificial intelligence company made the announcement in a blog post on Friday, saying it will start testing ads in the coming weeks in the U.S. for both non-paying subscribers and its “ChatGPT Go” users, who pay $8 a month. The company framed the inclusion of ads as a way to expand its product to more people. The company also vowed to never let ChatGPT’s responses be swayed by advertisement dollars.
“People trust ChatGPT for many important and personal tasks, so as we introduce ads, it’s crucial we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place,” OpenAI’s blog post said. “That means you need to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by what’s objectively useful, never by advertising.”
The ads will first begin showing up at the bottom of ChatGPT answers whenever the answer includes a relevant sponsored product or service, the blog post said. Users will also reportedly be able to dismiss any ad and tell OpenAI why the ad was dismissed.
Ads will also not be able to appear near sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health, or politics, and won’t be shown to users under 18-years-old, according to OpenAI.
Though valued at $500 billion, the startup loses more money than it makes and has been looking for ways to turn a profit. The company previously said it plans to lose tens of billions of dollars ever year, with higher ups expecting to lose roughly $74 billion in 2028 alone, according to financial documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
Technology journalist Cory Doctorow in 2022 identified adding ads to previously advertisement-free services as a trend of digital services becoming worse over time, including Google Search, TikTok, and even smartphones. Doctorow argued that the movement towards profit and away from user-friendly designs is an intentional pattern for tech companies, as companies with large audiences open their services to business customers to increase revenue.
“If you give these companies a small amount of money, they will target ads to users with exquisite fidelity,” Doctorow said during a recent appearance on “The Daily Show.” “Then the companies will start to make things worse for the business customers too. Ad targeting fidelity goes way down. Ad prices go way up. Ad fraud explodes … The only way to monetize businesses will then be through the tech companies’ corrupt ad network.”
Doctorow said the blame shouldn’t be squarely put on the technology companies, but on lawmakers who created the bad policy environment that allowed companies and ad networks like this to thrive. The policy environment could be changed to discourage this behavior, he said.
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