OpenAI has announced that ads will soon be appearing in ChatGPT for both free users and those who subscribe to the lowest paid tier for the LLM, called ChatGPT Go ($8 a month). A trial run is set to start in the US "in the coming weeks" before ads are rolled out globally.
The move comes with some world-class verbiage from OpenAI about how this isn't about revenue, but making "powerful AI accessible to everyone." The company goes on to outline its principles around ads, saying that ChatGPT's responses will remain "driven by what’s objectively useful, never by advertising" and that user conversations and data will be "protected and never sold to advertisers." Fair enough, though I'm not sure I'd trust anything OpenAI says.
