Hey! You got ads in my AI responses! On Monday, OpenAI announced that it plans to start expanding the types of advertisements that appear in ChatGPT alongside the model’s outputs.
The new “visual ad format,” as the company calls it, will include images that are meant to help “people imagine how products and services could fit into their lives.” In an example of the format, OpenAI showed a carousel-style ad slot with images of different types of groceries that a person might want to buy. Perhaps you couldn’t imagine eating a zucchini without first seeing an image of it. If so, this ad format is for you.
“For advertisers, this creates new opportunities to tell their story through images,” the company wrote in its announcement post, as if it had just invented pictures.
This marks one of the first major expansions of OpenAI’s advertising options, which it first introduced to ChatGPT back in February of this year. Much like these new visual ads, those sponsored spots appear at the end of the model’s outputs. Initially, those ads included text and a link to a product or service that was related to the conversation that the user was having with the chatbot.
To start, OpenAI will be serving the visual ads alongside images generated in ChatGPT. But the expectation is that these digital billboards will make their way throughout the ChatGPT ecosystem in the not-too-distant future—in part because OpenAI needs to figure out how to generate some major revenue and fast.
The company did report back in August that it hit $1 billion in “annualized revenue” for its advertising business, but it’s a figure worth taking with a grain of salt, given that it’s extrapolating a pretty short period of time as if growth will be linear and predictable. That’s usually not how these things work, and a lot of the early returns from advertisers on the ChatGPT placements have been underwhelming. So it’s entirely possible that the annualized figure is from the initial excitement of advertisers wanting to get their ads on the platform and doesn’t yet reflect the broad disappointment in the returns those ads produced for them.
Regardless, ads are likely going to be a part of the ChatGPT experience going forward for free users. The company did say that subscribers to the ChatGPT Plus, Pro, or Enterprise plans will be excluded from getting served these ads, so if you want to fork over some extra cash, you can save yourself from being exposed to a bit more marketing.
