OpenAI lets anyone inject ads into ChatGPT users’ sessions, targeting specific groups of people based on their email address, phone number, or a unique identifier on their phone, according to 404 Media’s own tests of ChatGPT’s advertising ecosystem.
While the ad targeting available in ChatGPT is somewhat standard practice across the advertising industry, the chatbot’s
one billion monthly active users
may not understand they, in some cases, are being specifically targeted because of their personal data the advertiser has uploaded to OpenAI. ChatGPT’s ad targeting is also novel in that it is also based on the prompts users enter into the chatbot, prompts that users may assume are private but which, as 404 Media has previously shown,
may be reviewed by humans
. Or in this case, used for ad targeting purposes.
“OpenAI’s advertising products are operating just like most other massive companies which start to monetize their audiences — they are boiling the frog and hoping their users won’t notice the privacy implications from their new ads,” Zach Edwards,
co-founder of DecryptAds
, a company that collects online advertising data for research purposes, told 404 Media.
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Do you know anything else about ChatGPT ads? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
OpenAI first introduced
ChatGPT ads in the U.S. in February
, before steadily expanding to other territories. When a Free or Go user types a prompt into ChatGPT, the chatbot will often display a related advertisement at the bottom of its answer. This month, OpenAI went a step further and pushed ads
alongside image generation results
.
To get a better understanding of how exactly ChatGPT’s ad targeting works, 404 Media ran two advertisements inside ChatGPT. Both of them read, “ChatGPT isn’t private. OpenAI hires humans to read users’ chats. Learn more,” and included a link to
404 Media’s recent article reve
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