By Kang G. Shin
Publication Date: 2026-04-24 12:31:00
Hundreds of millions of people consult artificial intelligence chatbots every day for everything from product recommendations to romance novels, making them an enticing audience to potentially target with under-the-radar advertising. In fact, our research suggests that AI chatbots could easily be used for covert advertising to manipulate their human users.
We are computer scientists who have been following AI security and privacy for several years. In a study we published in an Association for Computing Machinery journal, we found that chatbots trained to embed personalized product ads in query responses influenced people’s product choices. And most participants didn’t realize they were being manipulated.
These findings come at a crucial time. In 2023, Microsoft began running ads on Bing Chat, now called Copilot. Since then, Google and OpenAI have been experimenting with advertising in their own chatbots. Meta has started sending people personalized ads on Facebook…
