ChatGPT's Foray Into Sex Raises New Worries

ChatGPT is going there. Parent company OpenAI said this week that it would soon allow its AI chatbot to engage in "erotica for verified adults," as CEO Sam Altman put it. In a subsequent post, Altman promised proper safeguards, adding: "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."

• Big money: Online sex can mean big business, and the AP notes that Altman's company still isn't turning a profit. "They're not really earning much through subscriptions so having erotic content will bring them quick money," says Zilan Qian, a fellow at Oxford University's China Policy Lab. The change is expected to take effect in December.

• Big-name critic: Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban warned that "this is going to backfire" on the company, reports Axios. "No parent is going to trust that their kids can't get through your age gating." And think of high school, he added: "A few seniors in HS are 18 and decide it would be fun to show the hard core erotica they created to the 14 yr olds. What could go wrong?"
• Mental health: The National Center on Sexual Exploitation warns that "sexualized AI chatbots are inherently risky, generating real mental health harms from synthetic intimacy," per Variety. AI companies that already have gone down this path have run into trouble with content depicting child sexual abuse or with fake images of celebrities, notes the AP.
• Musk's chatbot: Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, already has begun experimenting with sexually explicit chatbot companions, and the New York Times took a look earlier this month.
• The shift: One big topic of online chatter is that in August, when asked to provide an example of how OpenAI was more concerned about helping the world than winning the AI race, Altman boasted, "Well, we haven't put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet," per CNBC.