TL;DR

Zoë Hitzig, a former OpenAI researcher and Harvard junior fellow, resigned from the company on the same day it began testing ads in ChatGPT. In a New York Times essay, she warned that the intimate nature of ChatGPT conversations makes advertising far riskier than on traditional platforms.

A Facebook parallel

Hitzig spent two years at OpenAI helping shape how its AI models were built and priced. She argued that ChatGPT’s advertising strategy risks repeating the same trajectory as Facebook, which initially promised users control over their data before gradually eroding those protections.

Users have shared medical fears, relationship problems, and religious beliefs with ChatGPT, Hitzig wrote, often “because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda.” She described this accumulated record as “an archive of human candor that has no precedent.”

“I believe the first iteration of ads will probably follow those principles,” Hitzig wrote. “But I’m worried subsequent iterations won’t, because the company is building an economic engine that creates strong incentives to override its own rules.”

The commercial shift

OpenAI’s ads appear on the free and $8-per-month Go subscription tiers for US users. Paid Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers will not see advertising. The company has said ads will be clearly labelled and will not influence ChatGPT’s responses.

Hitzig said she left because “OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I’d joined to help answer.”

Looking forward

The resignation adds to a pattern of departures by researchers concerned about the direction of major AI companies. As AI chatbots become more commercially driven, the question of whether intimate conversational data can coexist with advertising business models will become harder to avoid.