Is ChatGPT Ready for Sex?

I don't know if you remember when you first heard about chat GPT back in 2022 and 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 has all tech eventually or almost immediately

is used for sex.

My colleague Sam Shekner covers the sex industry or, 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 that first cameras.

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.

You at 11 tonight could AI be getting x rated.

Last October, open AI 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.

CEO Sam Altman says the chatbot will get more of a personality and quote treat adult users

like adults.

Many of the adults inside open AI 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 Conducin.

It's Tuesday, March 31st.

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

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Open AI had some of its earliest brushes with sexual content, even before it released

Chatchy PT.

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.

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 the 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 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.

I mean, before there was Chat Gbt, they even had a kind of clunky interface for developers.

And 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 Chatbot's dream on the internet content have.

So an OpenAI launched Chat Gbt.

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.

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.

There's 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 overreliant on the Chatbot.

And 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 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's this idea that we shouldn't be telling people what to do.

Another reason some people want to allow erotica and chat GBT 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 chat GBT as there's

more competition?

It's a really tough commercial fight and to the extent that you are telling users, no,

no, we're not going to give you this kind of content.

There's our upset about what they call unnecessary refusals, you know, when a chat bot with

high-car grails 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, like, grow faster, that would get more

time in chat GBT that we don't do because we know that, like, 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 sex bot avatar in chat GBT yet.

Well, we haven't put a sex bot avatar in chat GBT yet.

He indicated that it seemed pretty clear that Aeronica 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.

As 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 chat GBT 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 chat bot less enjoyable

for some people.

And then he just sort of added that they were going to put out a new version of chat GBT

that allows people to have more personality.

And oh yeah, kicker, we're just going to allow even more, like Aeronica, for verified

adults.

Boom, mic drop, end of tweet.

But Altman hadn't told everyone at OpenAI about the tweet before he posted it.

And when some learned that the company was changing its stance on Aeronica, they started

ringing alarm bells.

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Around the same time, OpenAI announced it was launching adult mode.

It also said it had a hand-picked group of advisors helping to ensure the company rolled

it out safely.

The group was called the expert council on well-being in AI.

You have a half dozen people who come from backgrounds like cognitive neuroscience, psychology,

human computer interaction.

And the company says that they're still responsible for the decisions they make, but that they

were going to turn to this council to help understand what would be healthiest for users.

Today, I said it would check in regularly with these experts, and when the council met

for one of its early meetings, adult mode was the main topic of discussion.

When they met in January, they had been told shortly before that the company was actually

moving forward with this product.

And people familiar with the matter tell us that they were unanimous and angry that the

company was going ahead despite understanding that there were some significant risks.

And they are encouraging the company to reconsider.

And I think that's why this meeting got so heated.

An OpenAI spokeswoman described its plan for adult mode as allowing chat GPT to generate

textual chats with adult themes, adding that it is smut, not pornography.

The company also added that it's developed a plan to monitor for a range of potential

long-term effects of adult mode, both positive and negative.

One of the things the council was so concerned about was what they had learned about the

emotional dependence that some users can develop on a chatbot, especially when it comes

to kids.

So the danger here and the debate was over whether or not younger users would stumble

into an erotic relationship with chat GPT and find themselves confronting an emotional

bond that they are just not mentally prepared to handle.

We all remember just how intense everything felt when we were teenagers and your first

love, your first kiss.

And if that happens with a chatbot, it's just I think some people inside the company wonder

what impact that might have.

Some AI companies have been accused of letting kids get too involved with their chatbots.

The example that is quite tragic is one involving character AI, where a 14-year-old boy in Florida

killed himself after chatting with the character AI at chatbot, and at that point he was saying

he was in love with the chatbot and involved in explicit chats with the chatbot according

to his mother's lawsuit.

So there are examples out there of this kind of content being associated with cases that

had that outcomes.

Character AI later blocked teens from accessing open-ended chats and settled the lawsuit.

In open AI, adult mode would be restricted to those over 18.

Like most tech companies, open AI asks how old you are when you sign up.

On top of that, they have an algorithm that predicts how old you are based on what you

talk about, and their thinking is that there's a lot of information that people give to their

chatbots, and so by sifting through that and kind of drawing conclusions, you can come

up with a pretty good idea of how old somebody is depending on what they say about their

friends.

Are they talking about AP English or are they talking about taking their kids to school?

You can kind of figure out through inference something about their age.

But according to Wall Street Journal reporting, this age verification system from open AI

isn't totally accurate.

At one point, their age prediction algorithm was misclassifying 12% of minors as adults.

And so if you look at industry standards for kind of automated age prediction, age estimation

software, you talk to an engineer, that's actually not a bad number.

I mean, they're getting 88%, that's a B plus, I guess.

Yeah, as the company says, it's in line with kind of industry standards, and they think

they can do better than that.

But when you multiply 12% by the roughly 100 million users under 18, the chat GPT has,

that's 12 million kids.

That's a lot.

That's 12 million kids.

An open AI spokeswoman said the company's age prediction algorithms show performance

similar to the rest of the industry, but will never be completely foolproof.

Pushback is also built up outside the company about the idea.

Here's Woopy Goldberg talking about it on the view.

Now, all I remember here is people crouching about how this stuff is affecting our kids

and why are we allowing sex into the conversation?

We can't even control, we can't.

I mean, what is it, am I crazy?

Paulman's original post said that adult mode would launch in December, but it never actually

came out.

After all the backlash, adult mode has been delayed with no specific rollout date.

So it sounds like this could be a little while.

Our colleagues reported recently that open AI is going to be focusing more on its core

business and less of the side business.

Clear to me if erotica is core or not, but that may play into how quickly they're willing

to dedicate the resources to solve things like age-gating and unhealthy attachment.

What are the stakes for open AI to get this right?

I think the stakes are huge, both because this is a chap out that's used, but maybe even

a billion people a week.

But I think it's most important if you step back as an example of the kinds of dilemmas

these companies are going to face over and over again going forward.

And we're starting to see now how these big companies handle when there are safety issues

or debates that come up around their products, how they handle it.

Do they do what's good for the world or do they do what's good for winning?

I guess to go back to that formulation.

Sex is fundamental to the human experience.

And our colleague Sam says that how AI companies incorporate sex into their chapas will have

a huge impact on our relationship with this new technology.

We're all trying to wrestle with what this new technology is going to do to our jobs

or to the economy or to humanity as a whole, but I'm actually especially interested in

what it's going to do to us as individuals, as people, how it's going to change the way

we think, how it's going to change the way we interact with each other.

And in this case, how it's maybe going to change the way we develop attachments and

even fall in love.

And this debate about whether or not a chatbot should get involved somewhat emotionally

with its users is one that has generated vigorous debate inside of open AI.

And I think there's a lot of debate externally as well.

What should people be allowed to do?

What is healthy to do?

And I think there's just a lot more questions and there are answers at this point.

That's all for today, Tuesday, March 31st.

A quick note before we go, newscorp, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, has

a content licensing partnership with OpenAI.

The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal, additional reporting

in this episode by Berber Gin and Georgia Wells.

Thanks for listening.

See you tomorrow.

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