Ryan Knudson

I don't know if you remember when you first heard about ChatGPT back in 2022 when it first came out and kind of took the world by storm.

How quickly did you think, oh, this is going to be used for sex?

My colleague Sam Schechner covers the sex industry.

Er, sorry, I mean the tech industry.

Some of the first things people did... Back in the 1800s was take pictures of naked people.

For the hottest technology these days, artificial intelligence, it's the same story.

Last October, OpenAI said it was working on a new chat GPT feature that would eventually be called Adult Mode.

But many of the adults inside OpenAI were not cool with this idea.

And now, the company is getting cold feet.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Ryan Knudson.

It's Tuesday, March 31st.

Coming up on the show, OpenAI's relationship with sex, it's complicated.

OpenAI had some of its earliest brushes with sexual content even before it released ChatGPT.

The Choose Your Own Adventure game was called AI Dungeon.

Not safe for work.

OpenAI noticed that not only were users choosing sexual adventures, the AI also seemed to like to push the boundaries.

AI Dungeon forced OpenAI's executives to start reckoning with the existence of AI erotica, and the company decided to take AI Dungeon down.

Oh, no.

So when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, it decided to basically ban explicit sexual content by training the model to largely rebuff any sexual conversations with users.