OpenAI is now introducing advertisements on ChatGPT for users in India, a significant change in the way the popular AI chatbot will be supported on its free and lower-cost plans. Some users have begun to see notifications on its Privacy Policy to explain how advertisements will work inside ChatGPT and what information may be used to personalise them.
Ads will be shown on free and ChatGPT Go plans, but users who subscribed to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Enterprise, Business, and Education plans will continue to use ChatGPT without ads. OpenAI said it will roll out advertising in the chatbot as a way to grow and make it more available for its services to a wider range of people as well as its customers.
The development is particularly relevant for Indian users as ChatGPT has a large and growing user base in the country. OpenAI already offers ChatGPT Go and Plus as paid subscription options in India, with ChatGPT Go priced at Rs 399 per month and ChatGPT Plus priced at Rs 1,999 per month, according to OpenAI.
OpenAI wants to differentiate advertisements from ChatGPT's normal answers. The company states that advertisements will be clearly labeled and visually separated from organic answers. Most importantly, it has also stated that advertisements will not influence the answers generated by ChatGPT. This means the presence of an advertisement is not supposed to change the chatbot's response to a user's question or affect the information it provides.
Another big part of OpenAI's announcement concerns ad personalisation. Users may get relevant ads based on information in ChatGPT, depending on the user's settings, that could be the topic of the current conversation, interactions with advertisements, and, where enabled, information from past chats and memory.
OpenAI says users will have controls to manage ad personalisation through their settings. That means users will be able to make decisions on whether or not they want advertisements to be personalised with some information within their ChatGPT experience. The company is also highlighting privacy controls as part of the changes to its policy.
One of OpenAI’s key assurances is that advertisers will not have access to users' private conversations. The company says advertisers cannot see ChatGPT chats, chat history, memories, or users’ personal details. Instead, advertisers will receive aggregated information about the performance of their advertisements, such as overall numbers of views or clicks.
This distinction is important because the introduction of targeted advertising into an AI chatbot raises questions about how conversational data could be used. OpenAI's stated policy is that the information used to personalise advertisements remains within ChatGPT and is not directly provided to advertisers. The company has also emphasised that advertisers do not receive individual users' conversations or private information.
The move is interesting for ChatGPT, which has always had an ad-free experience for users on its free tier. Because AI services require huge computing resources to run, advertising can be another way to make OpenAI another source of revenue while still providing ChatGPT to all the users.
For users who don't want advertisements, OpenAI's paid plans are still an option. Plus and Pro users, as well as Enterprise, Business, and Education customers, are not part of the company's current advertising campaign. ChatGPT Go users, however, are included despite paying for the lower-cost subscription.
OpenAI’s email to users also makes clear that the company considers advertising and chatbot responses to be separate systems from the user’s perspective. Ads will be labelled, visually separated, and are not intended to determine what ChatGPT says in response to a question.
The advertising rollout is thus likely to be an essential part of the ChatGPT experience in India, particularly for Free and Go users. Users will see ads in their chatbot experience, but OpenAI says privacy protections will keep advertisers from accessing personal conversations and information.
We expect that users will see privacy and advertising controls in the ChatGPT settings for their use as the rollout gets more widespread. The company will also provide specifics as advertisements become available to more users and markets.
For now, the biggest change for Indian ChatGPT users is straightforward: Free and Go users will see clearly labelled advertisements while Plus, Pro, Enterprise, Business, and Education users will remain ad-free. OpenAI maintains that ads will not shape ChatGPT’s answers and that advertisers will not be able to access private conversations, chat history, memories, or personal details.
