OpenAI to flood your eyeballs with visual ads

After adding text-based ads to its chatbot earlier this year, OpenAI announced on Monday that it was adding a new “visual ad format” to ChatGPT, which is precisely what it sounds like: Visual ads, like so much of the advertising content online, will now be part of the ChatGPT experience. OpenAI will initially test these ads during image generation. “Through images showing product inspiration, product usage, or the experiences they make possible, people can discover a new brand, understand what makes an offering distinctive, and decide what to buy,” OpenAI explained. “For advertisers, this creates new opportunities to tell their story through images.” If you build it, someone in the ‘States will inevitably find a way to cram an ad into it, which is why testing of OpenAI’s new ad format will begin sometime in October in the US, given its status as the advertising hellscape capital of the world. …