OpenAI launched its ad platform on Monday, making ChatGPT the newest canvas for advertising. The rollout marks a pivotal moment in generative AI, in which conversational platforms could become a new battleground for ad dollars.
But how will the ads affect the chat experience? To head off concerns, OpenAI said ads will only appear after chats, won’t appear at all during sensitive health conversations and won’t inform what responses users receive, to name a few of the guardrails in place.
Leading up to this week’s podcast, however, we still hadn’t spotted an ad in the wild – and neither had anyone on social media.
The launch of OpenAI’s ads business comes at a critical point in the AI arms race. Companies are burning through billions in training and inference costs for the next big model, while revenue lags behind. The cost to use AI is driving up the cost of RAM and making memory and processors scarcer commodities. These concerns, while less visible to us in the ad world, have in turn put pressure on those companies to create revenue. Hence, ads.
But the world of chatbot ads is still uncharted. Consumers, who will be seeing the ads, feel uncertain about how AI is changing their lives. And that mood was reflected in the ads running during the Super Bowl this past Sunday.
Anthropic took shots at OpenAI with an ad that showed an unnamed rival chat platform serving creepy ads. And Amazon’s Alexa+ ad spoke to fears that AI might physically hurt us – showing Chris Hemsworth being crushed by a garage door and drowned by a closing pool cover in his smart home – with a weird ending that dismissed the fear as “crazy.”
The number of AI ads in the Super Bowl brought to mind the crypto bubble from a few years past. (The Larry David FTX ad did not age well.)
With the addition of ads, AI conversations feel more commercial. Directly addressing customers with ads reminds us that bots are algorithms, not people. And many social platforms have struggled to find an ad experience that works for their users, iterating as they look for their version of, say, Facebook News Feed ads.
Will companies nail the experience of conversational ads in this first iteration, or will they cycle through multiple versions of chat ads before landing on the kind of novel format that feels inevitable in hindsight?
