ChatGPT will be capable of more kinky conversations after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the artificial intelligence company will soon allow “verified adult erotica” in its chatbots.
OpenAI is not the first company to try to profit from sexualized AI. As soon as the boom in AI-generated images and words erupted in 2022, sexual content became the biggest draw for AI tools.
But early adopters of mature AI also encountered legal and social minefields and harmful abuses as more people turned to technology for companionship and excitement.
Is Sexier ChatGPT Different? After three years of largely banning adult content, Altman said Wednesday that his company is not “the world’s elected morality police” and is ready to place new restrictions on teens while allowing “more user freedom for adults.”
“Just as society distinguishes other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example), we want to do the same here,” Altman wrote on social media platform X, whose owner Elon Musk has also introduced an animated AI character who flirts with paying subscribers.
For now, unlike Musk’s Grok chatbot, ChatGPT’s paid subscriptions are primarily marketed to professionals. But turning chatbots into friends and lovers could be another way for the world’s most valuable startup, which has more losses than profits, to make money worth its $500 billion valuation.
“They don’t make a lot of money through subscriptions, so erotic content could bring in some quick money,” said Jiran Qian, a researcher at Oxford University’s China Policy Research Institute who has studied the popularity of dating chatbots in the United States and China.
There are already about 29 million active users of AI chatbots designed specifically for romantic or sexual bonding, and that doesn’t include people who use traditional chatbots in this way, according to research published by Qian earlier this month.
It also does not include users of Character.AI. fight a lawsuit A chatbot modeled after Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen sexually abused a 14-year-old boy, leading to him committing suicide, a lawsuit claims. OpenAI is facing a lawsuit from the US. family of 16 year old child A ChatGPT user died by suicide in April.
Chen said he worries that real-world relationships will be negatively affected when mainstream chatbots, which are already prone to flirtatious behavior, are primed to make sexually explicit content available 24 hours a day.
“ChatGPT has a voice chat version. In the future, we expect everything to be there: audio, text, visuals,” she said.
Humans falling in love with human-like machines have long been a literary cautionary tale, from the popular science fiction of the last century to the legends of ancient Greece. Pygmalionobsessed with women carved from ivory. Creating such a machine would seem like an unusual detour for OpenAI, which was founded a decade ago as a nonprofit dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI.
altman said on the podcast OpenAI announced in August that it was trying to resist the temptation to introduce products that had the potential to “drive growth and revenue” but were “significantly misaligned” with its long-term mission. When asked for a specific example, he gave one. “Well, we haven’t put sexbot avatars into ChatGPT yet.”
Civitai, an Idaho startup that provides a platform for AI-generated art, learned the hard way that monetizing mature AI is not an easy path.
“When we launched the site, it was a conscious choice to allow adult content,” Justin Meyer, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview last year.
The Idaho startup, backed by prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which also invests in OpenAI, was one of several startups to capitalize on the sudden popularity of tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney that allow people to recall almost any kind of image by entering a description. Part of Stable Diffusion’s initial popularity was its ability to easily generate new types of synthetic and highly customized pornography.
“What we saw was a lot of interest in adult content,” Meyer said. By training these AI systems, known as models, “on mature themes, we’re actually able to make these models understand human anatomy better, and we’re actually getting better models,” he said.
“We didn’t want to impede growth that would really increase everything in the community at large, whether they’re interested in mature content or interested in Pixar,” Meyer said. “That’s why we’ve always fought to allow that early on and make sure users can filter out things they’re not interested in and keep safe. We ultimately wanted to give users the control to decide what they see on the site and what their experience is like.”
It also led to abuse. Civitai introduced new measures last year to detect and remove sexual images depicting children, but it remains a hub for AI-generated pornography, including fake images of celebrities. Facing increasing pressures, including pressure from credit card processors and new organizations Laws against non-consensual images Signed by President Donald Trump, Civitai banned users from creating deepfake images of real people earlier this year. The engagement was called off.
Another company that hasn’t shied away from adult content is Baltimore-based Nomi.ai, but company founder and CEO Alex Cardinalel said its companion chatbot is “strictly” aimed at users 18 and older and has never been marketed to children. And while chatbots aren’t designed for sex, Cardinale said in an interview earlier this year that people who form platonic relationships with chatbots could turn them into romantic ones.
“It’s up to you to decide how much you miss the human gaps in your life, and I think it’s different for everyone,” he said.
He declined to speculate on the number of Nomi users who have erotic conversations with chatbots, instead comparing them to real-life partners who do “adult content” as part of their lives, but who may also “do all sorts of other things together.”
“We don’t monitor user conversations that way,” Cardinale said.
Altman’s announcement that adult erotica could be coming to ChatGPT in December came a day after California’s governor made the announcement in December. Gavin Newsom vetoes bill The law would have prohibited companies from making AI chatbots available to anyone under 18 if it was “foreseeable” that they would have “sexual or sexually explicit interactions” with children or encourage self-harm. The tech industry fought fiercely against Newsom’s bill, saying it was too broad, but companies like OpenAI and Meta introduced new age restrictions and parental controls. For interaction between AI and teens.
