Chapter 1: What sparked the debate about ChatGPT's 'adult mode'?
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?
Not quickly enough. I mean, obviously, I should have thought that. Because all tech eventually or almost immediately is used for sex.
My colleague Sam Schechner covers the sex industry. Er, sorry, I mean the tech industry.
Sex and tech actually have gone together for quite a while. When you look at new technologies, almost one of the first things people do with it is create porn. You know, that's true with the first cameras.
Chapter 2: How has the relationship between sex and technology evolved?
Some of the first things people did... Back in the 1800s was take pictures of naked people.
And that's been true with other tech innovations along the way. The rise of personal phones. You have phone sex lines, you have video and television, and you have porn movies. And early growth in the internet certainly was driven in part by pornography. And it remains a huge business.
For the hottest technology these days, artificial intelligence, it's the same story.
New at 11 tonight, could AI be getting X-rated?
Last October, OpenAI said it was working on a new chat GPT feature that would eventually be called Adult Mode.
A less censored version of that chatbot that will include, drumroll please, erotica.
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Chapter 3: What concerns did OpenAI employees raise about adult content?
CEO Sam Altman says the chatbot will get more of a personality and, quote, treat adult users like adults.
But many of the adults inside OpenAI were not cool with this idea.
One of them actually warned the company that if they move forward, that they risked creating what that person described as a sexy suicide coach.
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.
In early 2021, they were working with a company that was operating a Choose Your Own Adventure game that was powered behind the scenes by OpenAI's AI models.
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Chapter 4: How did AI Dungeon influence OpenAI's approach to sexual content?
The Choose Your Own Adventure game was called AI Dungeon.
And when OpenAI got to look at what the traffic was coming through, they noticed that a large portion of the traffic for AI Dungeon was, as you say, NSFW.
Not safe for work.
Yeah.
OpenAI noticed that not only were users choosing sexual adventures, the AI also seemed to like to push the boundaries.
It would steer users into themes of violent sexual exploitation, sometimes without the users even bringing it up. And, you know, sometimes you would talk to AI Dungeon with a kind of tame sexual theme, and AI Dungeon would escalate it into much more intense sexual exchange.
AI Dungeon forced OpenAI's executives to start reckoning with the existence of AI erotica, and the company decided to take AI Dungeon down.
But this wasn't the only time this came up. Before there was ChatGPT, they even had a clunky interface for developers.
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Chapter 5: What emotional risks are associated with AI chatbots and users?
People familiar with the matter said that sometimes it would insert sexual themes into conversations that people weren't seeking. For instance, if a user described just a man and his daughter entering a room, the AI would, we were told, a quote, uncomfortable amount of the time, proceed to depict a scenario involving incest.
Oh, no.
Yeah. Now, I mean, for me, any amount of the time would be uncomfortable. Yeah. It's hard to put a figure on that, but it's definitely a tendency that chatbots trained on internet content have.
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.
They didn't have tools to moderate content where they could draw clear lines between types of erotica that might be totally cool and things that were very disturbing. So they just basically said that they weren't going to allow any erotica on the platform.
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Chapter 6: What were the reactions to OpenAI's plans for Adult Mode?
Another thing people inside OpenAI were worried about when it came to AI erotica was that it might cause some users to become too attached to their chatbots.
there are a certain number of power users who can become very emotionally engaged with it. That can have multiple potentially bad impacts on them. For instance, it can help push out relationships they have with real humans and lead them to become emotionally over-reliant on the chatbot.
The fear is that for those subset of people and potentially for other people as well, that when you mix in sexual content, literally tickling the parts of the brain that govern attachment and love and devotion, that you could just pour fuel on that fire.
A spokeswoman for OpenAI said the company trains its models not to encourage exclusive relationships with users and to remind users that they need to have relationships in the real world. Not everyone at OpenAI agreed with the company's erotica ban, though. Some thought that the company should let go of its inhibitions.
There are people inside OpenAI who think, listen, this is something that people want.
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Chapter 7: How does OpenAI plan to monitor the effects of Adult Mode?
And who are we to say this or that fetish or interest is or isn't okay? That's the same logic that you might use to ban gay content a generation ago. And so who are we to ban this? And maybe we should even open this up and allow more of this potentially pornographic content. So there is this idea that we shouldn't be telling people what to do.
Another reason some people want to allow erotica on ChatGPT is because, well, sex sells. And the company wants people to sign up for paid subscriptions.
It's big for their business, too. You know, are you going to maintain the growth that you've seen in ChatGPT as there's more competition? It's a really tough commercial fight.
Chapter 8: What are the potential consequences of AI erotica for users?
And to the extent that you are telling users, no, no, we're not going to give you this kind of content, Users are upset about what they call unnecessary refusals. You know, when a chatbot with high guardrails says, no, I won't do this, no, I won't do that. So, you know, this is important for them on that level.
Last August, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went on a podcast and was asked whether the company was making its decisions based on profit or based on what was best for humanity.
He was asked if there were decisions that he had made that were, quote, best for the world, but not best for winning.
What is an example of a decision that you've had to make that is best for the world, but not best for winning?
And he kind of hemmed and hawed for a little bit. There's a lot of things we could do that would grow faster, that would get more time in ChatGPT that we don't do because we know that our long-term incentive is to stay as aligned with our users as possible.
The host, Cleo Abram, then asked Altman to be more specific. He took a long pause and then said, Well, we haven't put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet.
Well, we haven't put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet. He indicated that it seemed pretty clear that Erotica would probably boost revenue and growth, that it would be sticky for users. But he actually said that he's proud of how little the company gets distracted by those kinds of temptations.
That's part of the reason why it was so surprising when, just a few months later, OpenAI appeared to give in to that temptation. In October, Altman made a post on X. He said that ChatGPT had restrictions on certain types of content in order to protect people's mental health, and that these restrictions had been necessary even if they'd made the chatbot less enjoyable for some people.
And then he just sort of added that they were going to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have more personality. And, oh yeah, kicker, we're just going to allow even more, like erotica for verified adults. Boom. Mic drop. End of tweet.
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