ChatGPT will be able to have more complex conversations after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the AI company will soon allow its chatbot to engage in “adult-approved erotica.”
OpenAI won’t be the first to try to cash in on sexualized AI. Sexual content was the biggest attraction for AI tools almost as soon as 2022. the boom in AI-generated images and words began.
But early adopters of mature AI have also faced legal and societal minefields and harmful abuses as more people turn to the technology for companionship or adoration.
Will sexier ChatGPT be different? After largely banning adult content for three years, Altman said Wednesday that his company is “not the elected moral police of the world” and is ready to allow “more user freedom for adults” while setting new boundaries for teenagers.
“In the same way society draws other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example), we want to do a similar thing here,” Altman wrote on social media platform X, whose owner Elon Musk has also introduced an animated AI character flirting with paid subscribers.
Currently, unlike Musk’s Grok chatbot, paid subscriptions to ChatGPT are mostly for professional use. But allowing a chatbot to become a friend or romantic partner could be another way for the world’s most valuable startup, which loses more money than it makes, to generate profits that could justify its $500 billion valuation.
“They don’t really make much money from subscriptions, so having erotic content will bring in money quickly,” said Zilan Qian, a fellow at Oxford University’s China Policy Lab who has studied the popularity of dating-based chatbots in the US and China.
According to a study published by Qian earlier this month, there are already about 29 million active users of AI chatbots designed specifically for romantic or sexual connection, and that’s not counting people who use regular chatbots that way.
And that doesn’t include Character.AI users, who are fighting a lawsuit alleging that a chatbot modeled after Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy and pushed him to kill himself. OpenAI is facing a lawsuit from the family of a 16-year-old ChatGPT user who killed himself in April.
Qian said she worries about the loss of real-life relationships when mainstream chatbots, which are already prone to anger, are ready to deliver sexually suggestive content 24 hours a day.
“ChatGPT has versions of voice chats. I hope that in the future if they become that way – voice, text, video – everything is there,” she said.
Humans falling in love with human-like machines has long been a literary cautionary tale, from popular science fiction in the last century to the ancient Greek legend of Pygmalion obsessed with a woman he created from ivory. Building such a machine would seem like an unusual path for OpenAI, founded a decade ago as a nonprofit organization dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI.
Altman in August said on the podcast that OpenAI tried to resist the temptation to introduce products that could “increase growth or revenue” but would be “highly inconsistent” with the long-term mission. Asked for a specific example, he provided one: “Well, we haven’t put a sexbot avatar on ChatGPT yet.”
Idaho-based startup Civitai, an AI-powered art platform, has learned the hard way that monetizing mature AI won’t be easy.
“When we launched the site, it was a conscious choice to allow adult content,” company founder and CEO Justin Maier said in an interview last year.
Backed by the impressive venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which also invested in OpenAI, the Idaho startup was one of several trying to take advantage of suddenly popular tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, which let people enter a description and create almost any image. Part of Stable Diffusion’s initial popularity was its ability to create a new kind of synthetic and highly customized pornography.
“We’ve seen a lot of interest in adult content,” Maier said. By training these artificial intelligence systems, known as models, “with mature subjects, we were actually able to make these models more closely match the human anatomy and actually be better models,” he said.
“We didn’t want to prevent the kind of growth that really increased everything in the community, whether you were interested in adult content or Pixar,” Maier said. “That’s why we made it possible early on and always fought to be able to filter and keep things if it’s not what you’re interested in. At the end of the day, we wanted to give the user the power to decide what they see on the site and what their experience is going to be.”
It also led to abuse. Civitai implemented new measures last year to detect and remove sexual images featuring children, but it has remained at the center of AI-generated pornography, including fake images of celebrities. Civitas stopped users from creating fake images of real people earlier this year in the face of mounting pressure, including from credit card processors and a new law signed into law by President Donald Trump. The engagement broke off.
Another company that hasn’t shied away from adult content is Baltimore-based Nomi.ai, although its founder and CEO Alex Cardinell said its chatbots are “strictly” aimed at users over 18 and have never been marketed to children. They’re also not meant for sex, although Cardinell said in an interview earlier this year that they can become romantic for people who develop platonic relationships with their chatbot.
“It really depends on the user, where they’re missing the human gap in their life. And I think it’s different for everyone,” he said.
He declined to speculate on how many Nomi users have erotic conversations with the chatbot, comparing it to real-life partners who may do “mature content stuff” for a portion of their lives, but “all kinds of other things together.”
“We don’t monitor user conversations like this,” Cardinell said.
Altman announced that adult erotica could appear on ChatGPT in December, a day after California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have banned companies from making AI chatbots available to people under 18 if they could be predicted to engage in “erotic or sexual interactions” with children or encourage them to harm themselves. The tech industry strongly opposed the bill, which Newsom said was too broad, but OpenAI, Meta and others have introduced new age restrictions and parental controls on AI-teen interactions.