I’ll get right to the point: ChatGPT has not technically started showing ads—not for Target, and not for anyone else. It does sometimes answer questions with little graphical links to Target that look extremely ad-like. Oh, and just weeks ago, Target announced that a feature that connects ChatGPT users to Target’s online store would be coming soon…
I’m in ChatGPT (paid Plus subscription), asking about Windows BitLocker
and it’s F-ing showing me ADS TO SHOP AT TARGET.
Yeah, screw this. Lose all your users. pic.twitter.com/2Z5AG8pnlJ
— Benjamin De Kraker (@BenjaminDEKR) December 3, 2025
But this is not the mythical ChatGPT ad rollout. It’s just a recipe for irritation and confusion. And the timing is horrendous.
On Friday, Alistair Barr at Business Insider wrote about OpenAI’s already infamous “red alert”—the company-wide state of emergency aimed at improving ChatGPT amid declining performance metrics while it’s main competitor, Google, has earned positive press and adoring reviews for its latest AI offerings. One thing Barr’s reporting emphasizes above all: OpenAI is delaying its rollout of ads in favor of winning back user loyalty.
But it may already be too late.
An X user known as Benjamin De Kraker initially posted about what seemed to be ads for Target inside ChatGPT on Tuesday, December 2. “I’m in ChatGPT (paid Plus subscription), asking about Windows BitLocker and it’s F-ing showing me ADS TO SHOP AT TARGET,” De Kraker wrote, adding “Yeah, screw this. Lose all your users.” The post went viral.
In a popular Reddit post on Wednesday, user BurtingOff declared this, “The death of ChatGPT.” In the comments, other users claimed to be seeing the same thing as De Kraker, sometimes seeming much less irked than De Kraker, while still believing the Target links to be ads.
Also on Wednesday, Daniel McAuley, OpenAI’s head of data and machine learning, told De Kraker the function wasn’t an ad. OpenAI has “launched apps from some of our pilot partners,” and was trying to integrate the discovery mechanism for those apps into ChatGPT, he explained. The eventual goal, McAuley claimed, is ads that “augment” the user experience.
hey benjamin, this is not an ad. we’ve launched apps from some of our pilot partners since devday, including target, and have been working to make the discovery mechanism for apps more organic inside chatgpt. our goal is that apps augment the ux when relevant to a conversation,…
— Daniel McAuley (@_dmca) December 4, 2025
When it comes to the crossover of AI and ads, the idea that the ads are actually going to make the experience better is as implausible as it is ubiquitous. For instance, Deepa Jatkar who runs the ad agency WPP’s AI-centric campaigns for Amazon India said almost the exact same thing in an interview in August: “Our goal is to create a more human and relevant experience, connecting with people’s actual feelings, not just data points.”
So then on Friday, OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen issued a mea culpa-flavored reply to De Kraker. “I agree that anything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care, and we fell short,” Chen wrote. OpenAI turned off such shopping suggestions and Chen said the company was looking into ways to prevent this sort of thing from happening down the line.
But around that same time, the head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley posted something similar with a much less apologetic tone. “I’m seeing lots of confusion about ads rumors in ChatGPT,” he wrote. Then he added the following:
“There are no live tests for ads – any screenshots you’ve seen are either not real or not ads. If we do pursue ads, we’ll take a thoughtful approach. People trust ChatGPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that.”
And that only seemed to further inflame the situation—at least where De Kraker is concerned.
But that’s enough from De Kraker. The actual problem seems to be that ChatGPT has been inserting connections to its new app function in a way users have—quite clearly—rejected as unnatural and way too ad-like.
At the same time, no, these are not ads. All past experience with tech corporations should tell you that OpenAI will come out and announce when ads are in place—because that’s revenue baby!Investors will “ooh” and “ahh” like they’re watching the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree light up, and OpenAI leaders will not be coy or furtive about actual ads when they do happen.
So while OpenAI didn’t roll out ads, which would have at least help secure more investor cash at the cost of annoying people like De Kraker, it kicked off ChatGPT’s new phase of relentless focus on pleasing the user under a dark cloud of needless user unrest. Whoops!
