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Hey Kaitlyn, tech CEOs say all sorts of things on podcasts, especially when they’re sure the interviewer isn’t going to hardball them. So when Altman announced last week that ChatGPT would launch an official erotica offering for adults in December, there was a podcast moment for that. On tech podcaster Cleo Abram’s show, he let fly a variety of thinkers, including “a kid born today will never be smarter than AI,” and that what’s real and what’s not is “just gonna gradually converge,” but we’re revisiting that episode now because in it, he acknowledged that putting a “sex bot avatar” in ChatGPT would be a move to “juice growth.” Something the company had been tempted to do, he said, but had resisted, until now. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared on Cleo Abram's podcast in August where he said the company was “tempted” to add sexual content in the past, but resisted, saying that a “sex bot avatar” in ChatGPT would be a move to “juice growth.” In light of his announcement last week that ChatGPT would soon offer erotica, revisiting that conversation is revealing. It’s not clear yet what the specific offerings will be, or whether it’ll be an avatar like Grok’s horny waifu. But OpenAI is following a trend we’ve known about for years: There are endless theorized applications of AI, but in the real world many people want to use LLMs for sexual gratification, and it’s up for the market to keep up. In 2023, a16z published an analysis of the generative AI market, which amounted to one glaringly obvious finding: people use AI as part of their sex lives. As Emanuel wrote at the time in his analysis of the analysis: “Even if we put ethical questions aside, it is absurd that a tech industry kingmaker like a16z can look at this data, write a blog titled ‘How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?’ and not come to the obvious conclusion that people are using it to jerk off. If you are actually interested in the generative AI boom and you are not identifying porn as a core use for the technology, you are either not paying attention or intentionally pretending it’s not happening.”
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Altman even hinting at introducing erotic roleplay as a feature is huge, because it’s a signal that he’s no longer pretending. People have been fucking the chatbot for a long time in an unofficial capacity, and have recently started hitting guardrails that stop them from doing so. People use Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Elon Musk’s Grok, and self-rolled large language models to roleplay erotic scenarios whether the terms of use for those platforms permit it or not, DIYing AI boyfriends out of platforms that otherwise forbid it. And there are specialized erotic chatbot platforms and AI dating simulators, but what OpenAI does—as the owner of the biggest share of the chatbot market—the rest follow. Already we see other AI companies stroking their chins about it. Following Altman’s announcement, Amanda Askell, who works on the philosophical issues that arise with Anthropic’s alignment, posted: “It's unfortunate that people often conflate AI erotica and AI romantic relationships, given that one of them is clearly more concerning than the other. Of the two, I'm more worried about romantic relationships. Mostly because it seems like it would make users pretty vulnerable to the AI company in many ways. It seems like a hard area to navigate responsibly.” And the highly influential anti-porn crowd is paying attention, too: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation put out a statement following Altman’s post declaring that actually, no one should be allowed to do erotic roleplay with chatbots, not even adults. (Ron DeHaas, co-founder of Christian porn surveillance company Covenant Eyes, resigned from the NCOSE board earlier this month after his 38-year-old adult stepson was charged with felony child sexual abuse.) In the August interview, Abram sets up a question for Altman by noting that there’s a difference between “winning the race” and “building the AI future that would be best for the most people,” noting that it must be easier to focus on winning. She asks Altman for an example of a decision he’s had to make that would be best for the world but not best for winning. Altman responded that he’s proud of the impression users have that ChatGPT is “trying to help you,” and says a bunch of other stuff that’s not really answering the question, about alignment with users and so on. But then he started to say something actually interesting: “There's a lot of things we could do that would like, grow faster, that would get more time in ChatGPT, that we don't do because we know that like, our long-term incentive is to stay as aligned with our users as possible. But there's a lot of short-term stuff we could do that would really juice growth or revenue or whatever, and be very misaligned with that long-term goal,” Altman said. “And I'm proud of the company and how little we get distracted by that. But sometimes we do get tempted.” “Are there specific examples that come to mind?” Abram asked. “Any decisions that you've made?” After a full five-second pause to think, Altman said, “Well, we haven't put a sex bot avatar in ChatGPT yet.” “That does seem like it would get time spent,” Abram replied. “Apparently, it does.” Altman said. They have a giggle about it and move on. Two months later, Altman was surprised that the erotica announcement blew up. “Without being paternalistic we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals,” he wrote. “But we are not the elected moral police of the world. In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here.” This announcement, aside from being a blatant hail mary cash grab for a company that’s bleeding funds because it’s already too popular, has inspired even more “bubble’s popping” speculation, something boosters and doomers alike have been saying (or rooting for) for months now. Once lauded as a productivity godsend, AI has mostly proven to be a hindrance to workers. It’s interesting that OpenAI’s embrace of erotica would cause that reaction, and not, say, the fact that AI is flooding and burdening libraries, eating Wikipedia, and incinerating the planet. It’s also interesting that OpenAI, which takes user conversations as training data—along with all of the writing and information available on the internet—feels it’s finally gobbled enough training data from humans to be able to stoop so low, as Altman’s attitude insinuates, to let users be horny. That training data includes authors of romance novels and NSFW fanfic but also sex workers who’ve spent the last 10 years posting endlessly to social media platforms like Twitter (pre-X, when Elon Musk cut off OpenAI’s access) and Reddit, only to have their posts scraped into the training maw. Altman believes “sex bots” are not in service of the theoretical future that would “benefit the most people,” and that it’s a fast-track to juicing revenue, something the company badly needs. People have always used technology for horny ends, and OpenAI might be among the last to realize that—or the first of the AI giants to actually admit it.
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