OpenAI will put visual ads next to ChatGPT image results
A US-only test later this month widens how one of the most-used AI products makes money.
OpenAI is going to start showing visual ads inside ChatGPT, placed next to the images the chatbot makes for users. The company announced the format on October 5, in a post titled "Building advertising for the way people use AI." TechCrunch's Sarah Perez, in a report out the same day, wrote that the ads will show up alongside ChatGPT's image-generation results.
This starts small. The ads arrive later this month, and only in the United States for now. "The new ads will begin to appear later this month in the U.S. only for now," TechCrunch reported. At first they will carry products and services from a test group of advertisers, not every brand that wants in.
Where they sit matters. The ads go beside the pictures ChatGPT makes when you ask it to create an image, not inside the text of its answers. OpenAI's title frames the whole thing as advertising built around what people already do with the product.
OpenAI also said it is widening the measurement tools, attribution partnerships and brand-suitability controls it gives advertisers. Those are the systems a brand uses to tell whether its money is doing anything, and to keep its ads away from content it would rather not sit next to.
Why it counts: ads are moving deeper into ChatGPT, which shifts how one of the most heavily used AI products earns its money, and changes what people see when they open it. What you see inside ChatGPT will now depend, in part, on who paid to be there.
A lot is still unknown. Neither OpenAI's summary nor TechCrunch's names the advertisers in the test group, the measurement or attribution partners, or the price of the ads. It's also unclear how the ads get labelled for users, and what data decides which ones each person sees.
Sources
- Building advertising for the way people use AI · OpenAI News
- OpenAI launches visual ads that appear alongside image generation results · TechCrunch, AI