Ads are coming to ChatGPT, starting with the picture you asked it to draw

Ask ChatGPT for a picture and you get a progress bar while it works. OpenAI announced on Sunday that the space underneath that bar is about to be sold.

The new format is a sponsored card with product photos and a Learn more button, sitting next to the image you asked for rather than inside it. OpenAI says it is labelled as an ad and kept separate from the result, and that ads will be held back from conversations it judges sensitive. Testing starts in the United States later this month with a small group of advertisers. Paid subscribers do not see them; the free tier does, and that is where most of ChatGPT's roughly 1.2 billion weekly users sit.

The part worth reading twice is the plumbing announced alongside it. OpenAI has wired in conversion tracking through companies including LiveRamp, Hightouch and Tealium, plus app attribution partners, which is the machinery that connects an ad you saw to a purchase you later made somewhere else. DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science are brought in to check where ads land. OpenAI's line is that these partners do not get access to private conversations, and there is no reason to doubt it, but the direction of travel is clear enough: the chatbot is becoming an advertising surface, and advertising surfaces run on knowing things about you.

Nothing to do today beyond knowing it is coming, and remembering that an ad inside a chat window is still an ad, with the same rules about what you click. Windows has its own advertising identifier and a pile of related switches, and Tendvane's privacy and accounts check puts them on one page instead of five.