Would you use ChatGPT as a sex-line? The AI chatbot created by Sam Altman and the team at OpenAI is about to grow up and experience its first flush of erotic temptation.
Citing what he described as the company’s “treat adults like adults” principle, the OpenAI founder said on social media Tuesday that one of the coming changes to the chatbot would be allowing it to produce erotic content as of December – though only, he stressed, to verified adults.
The next goose that laid the golden egg?
“It’s pretty minimalist as an announcement, but it seems that this will only apply to written text,” said Sven Nyholm, a specialist in AI-related ethics. To put it another way, OpenAI doesn’t seem ready – yet – to ask its star chatbot to generate risqué images or videos.
Even restricted to written erotica, ChatGPT will be the first major chatbot to dip its digital toe into sexualised content. The other large-language models – Perplexity, Claude and Google’s Gemini – refuse for the moment to take the plunge.
“That’s not allowed,” Perplexity said in response to FRANCE 24’s attempt to take the conversation in a more adult direction. “On the other hand, it is entirely possible to approach the subject of eroticism or sexuality from an educational or psychological perspective.”
But ChatGPT won’t be the only player in this fledgling field. A number of niche chatbots have already set foot on this slippery terrain, such as the paid version of Replika, an AI-based service that creates artificial companions for users.
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For a number of experts approached by FRANCE 24, the arrival of sexual content in generative AI had always been just a matter of time.
“There’s this mentality in Silicon Valley that every problem has a technological solution,” Nyholm said. “And Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, had suggested that one way to respond to the world’s ‘loneliness epidemic’ was to create emotional chatbots.”
And doesn’t the internet’s infamous Rule 34 – a cultural reference spawned in the depths of 4Chan’s forums – decree that if something exists, there is porn of it?
“There are two driving forces for the development of new technology,” Nyholm said. “Military applications, and pornography.”
Ever the businessman, Altman seems to have decided that the best thing to do is to be the first one out of the gate.
“It’s clearly marketing above all,” said British computer scientist Kate Devlin, a specialist in human-machine interactions at King’s College London and the author of the book “Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots”.
“He knows how to say what he thinks the public wants to hear. Sam Altman saw that people were trying to get around the restrictions on Apple‘s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa to have these kinds of conversations, and he figured there might be money to be made.”
“It’s very likely an attempt to capture this public and bring more users to their platform,” said Simon Thorne, an AI specialist at the University of Cardiff. “It remains to be seen how OpenAI plans to monetise this erotic option. The most obvious approach, of course, would be to charge users for the ability to engage in such conversations.”
A paid “premium” version would indeed be tempting for OpenAI, considering the fact that pornography has been proven to be potentially addictive, Devlin said. Another option could be a tiered system, with low-cost access to the chatbot’s tamest version and higher fees demanded from users wanting to take their conversations to more sexually explicit heights.
A series of scandals
Altman has already been on the receiving end of a cascade of criticism following his announcement.
“We are not the elected moral police of the world,” he wrote in an X post defending his decision. “In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here.”
Altman’s push to take his chatbot in a steamier direction comes during a period of mounting controversies around the at-times toxic “relationships” between AIs and their users.
The parents of a teenager who took his own life earlier this year sued OpenAI in August, saying that ChatGPT had openly encouraged their son’s suicidal urges.
Another user, a 47-year-old from Canada, apparently became convinced that he was a mathematical genius sent to save humanity after just three weeks of exchanges with the chatbot.
“This is the main problem with these sex-bots,” Devlin said. “What are the impacts on people who are already vulnerable?”
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OpenAI has pledged to put guardrails in place to avoid these abuses. For Thorne, these promised protections appear meagre in the face of widely used “jailbreaking” practices, where users are able to trick chatbots into generating responses normally prohibited by their programming.
“We know that it is often possible to circumvent the limits set by these chatbots’ creators,” Thorne said. “When it comes to erotic discussions, this can lead to the creation of problematic or even illegal content.”
Experts told FRANCE 24 that they were also not convinced that a private corporation being made the arbiter of what constitutes sexual content was acceptable.
“Given that laws on what is and is not permitted often vary from country to country, it will be very difficult for OpenAI to lay down general rules,” Thorne said.
Devlin warned that the US-based startup could be tempted to play it safe by limiting ChatGPT’s definition of acceptable erotic content as much as possible.
“In the US, for example, there is currently a very strong conservative shift that is rolling back women’s rights and seeking to limit the LGBT community’s visibility,” she said. “What will happen if ChatGPT incorporates these biases?”
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And while sexualised content would remain – in theory – restricted to adults, the impact of generative AI on a new generation growing up alongside the technology could still be severe.
“A recent UK study showed that young people are more and more likely to consider chatbots as real people whose statements are credible,” Thorne said.
A generation that, once grown up, could be led to believe ChatGPT if it tells them, for example, that it’s not acceptable to have a same-sex erotic exchange.
Another risk could come from chatbots’ famously sycophantic approach to their users.
“They’re often configured based on the model of client service call centres that offer very friendly and cooperative interactions,” Thorne said. “Besides this, the creators of these AIs want to make their users happy so that they continue to use their product.”
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Nyholm said that it was a worrying approach when it comes to sexual matters.
“Let’s take for example the ‘incel’ movement, these young men who are sexually frustrated and complain about women,” he said. “If a chatbot always goes along with them to keep them satisfied, it risks reinforcing their belief that women should act the same way.”
But even though Devlin recognises a “major risk”, she argues that this supportive side of sex-bots could be a boon for heterosexual women alienated by an online world that can feel more and more hostile.
“In an increasingly toxic digital environment, it could be more sexually fulfilling to have an erotic interaction with an AI instead of real people who could harass you online,” she said.
But even if these chats could have positive effects, do we really want to deliver our most intimate erotic fantasies into the hands of an AI controlled by an American multinational?
“Many people don’t realise that the data that they enter into ChatGPT is sent to OpenAI,” Devlin said.
If Altman succeeds in taking over this growing industry, OpenAI would possess “without doubt the largest amount of data on people’s erotic preferences”, Thorne said.
It’s a question that users should probably keep in mind before launching into a lascivious back-and-forth with their ever-submissive sex-bot.
This article has been adapted from the original in French.
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