OpenAI Abandons ChatGPT's Erotic Mode (techcrunch.com) 80
OpenAI has indefinitely paused plans for an erotic mode in ChatGPT as part of a broader strategy shift away from side projects and toward business and coding tools. TechCrunch reports: The proposed "adult mode," which CEO Sam Altman first floated in October, had inspired considerable controversy from tech watchdog groups as well as from OpenAI's own staff. In January, a meeting between company executives and its council of advisers got heated, with one of the advisers cautioning that OpenAI could be in the process of developing a "sexy suicide coach," The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Amidst all of the criticism, the release of the feature was delayed multiple times. FT notes that the erotic feature now has no timeline for release. When reached for comment by TechCrunch, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company had "nothing further to add."
Amidst all of the criticism, the release of the feature was delayed multiple times. FT notes that the erotic feature now has no timeline for release. When reached for comment by TechCrunch, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company had "nothing further to add."
No wonder (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly think it's bizarre that these companies have more to fear legally and in terms of backslash in letting a chatbot write down erotic texts than they do about the fact that they constantly alter how models work and how the censorship filter works mid-month after people have already paid based on the free trial.
We apparently live in a world where a bot writing down sexy stories is a bigger concern than blatant bait-and-switch.
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Based on the description it also includes images and maybe video. So deepfake porn of people without their consent, and without adequate regard of age.
Yes, they toss some stuff into system prompt to 'promise to be a good boy', but as an *enforcement* strategy, that's been demonstrably a poor mechanism that gets worse with nuance.
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"So deepfake porn of people without their consent, and without adequate regard of age."
Without regard for age would be illegal content so that would be blocked. As for deepfakes... they are fake and therefore the person they look similar to has no more claim than to images of any of the thousands of similar looking people walking around. I see no reason they need to have an 'erotic mode' but for adult users adult content and other perfectly legal content should not be blocked. In fact, generally speaking th
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There is no world where making shit up about other people via AI is a long-term acceptable strategy.
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Based on the description it also includes images and maybe video. So deepfake porn of people without their consent, and without adequate regard of age.
Well, this simply isn't a concern for text so it's still absolutely bizarre we live in a world where OpenAI fears this more than it fears the potential problems of that they practice blatant bait and switch.
And to be honest, I think that even for images and videos it's bizarre that OpenAI fears it more than the blatant bait-and-switch thing and that apparently legal watchdogs hold it more responsible for that and not the user that entered the specific prompt than again the blatent bait-and-switch. I'm sorry
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And why is “spicey” the supposed problem here? People can edit these characters to make them say and do whatever so why are sexual things the limit when I can make fake footage of someone I know where that person says anything I want or does some other random thing?
People will honestly also just adapt and as the technology becomes common place learn to not trust anything. The same was true with pictures when Photoshop came out. See a picture of George Bush in a bikini somewhere? People just didn
Writes someone with no kids (Score:1)
"We apparently live in a world where a bot writing down sexy stories is a bigger concern than blatant bait-and-switch."
Yeah, it is. When/if you reproduce your priorities will change.
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"Spawning crotchgoblins doesn't give you any special insight."
Wrong, it changes your perspective. When you're out of short trousers you may understand that.
"Raise your damn kids and stop expecting the internet to do it for ya."
Whoooshh....
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Sounds like you failed to plan ahead and schedule laundry day in a way that you'd always have a clean pair of short trousers available for each kid. Maybe a career with planning responsibilities would have changed your perspective on that.
I have 2 kids...not concerned + can't ban cars (Score:1)
"We apparently live in a world where a bot writing down sexy stories is a bigger concern than blatant bait-and-switch."
Yeah, it is. When/if you reproduce your priorities will change.
I have 2 kids. We've had many conversations about sex. I've told them they're not allowed to watch porn or consume inappropriate content. However, I also educate them as to why they should wait until they're 18 and frankly, when they want to talk about sex, I make it a boring academic discussion about science and reproduction...so instead of "ooh nice titties"...the conversation goes to lactation and hormones produced and how babies rely on mother's milk during their early years. Sex isn't naughty or sca
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Some parents don't know or don't care what their kids do and this would be just another thing to screw with their kids heads.
"We don't go around banning cars to nerf the world for our children."
No, but we do ban drugs, don't sell kids cigarettes and have a minimum age for drinking for a reason - they're children, not small adults, they don't think the same way as adults and don't yet have those mental tripwires that stop them doing stupid stuff so we have to stop them doing it.
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Why can't they watch porn though? What's going to happen? Is it going to scar them, give them brain cancer? The only argument I can see is that it will give them an unrealistic view of sex, which is true, but that can be raised against every single piece of fiction, especially fiction that is explicitly targeting children which tends to give them an entirely inaccurate view of how things work.
My kids asked the same question.... (Score:2)
Why can't they watch porn though? What's going to happen? Is it going to scar them, give them brain cancer? The only argument I can see is that it will give them an unrealistic view of sex, which is true, but that can be raised against every single piece of fiction, especially fiction that is explicitly targeting children which tends to give them an entirely inaccurate view of how things work.
I don't know the answer to that, TBH. The experts say it's bad. It's illegal...so I tell them they need to follow the law. I don't think a 10yo and 12yo should be picking and choosing which laws the follow or don't follow. Generally, when I don't know the answer, I defer to experts....I also just don't care enough to follow up. Life is just fine if they do normal kid stuff rather than goon to the worst the internet has to offer.
I think it's probably better for them to not have their developing brains
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The experts say it's bad.
They don't all say that. There are certainly some who do but there are just as many who say there is no harm and it's all just their own personal moralism and the ones who say it don't have much to back up the idea that it's bad and can't even answer what concretely would happen. And yes, there are studies that show negative associations with pornography and expectations but there is no evidence isn't worse than any other fiction. — That's in general the issue with these “harm” studies. O
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Why can't they watch porn though? What's going to happen?
From a parent's view you mean, why go out of our way to block it? Are you serious? It's extremely unrealistic for one thing. This is a tech site for old farts, it'd be like letting your kids program in BASIC.
Imagine your kids all got to some age where they all started thinking about programming every ten seconds. Then you find fucking JavaScript on their computer. It is not educational in a healthy way.
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Okay, apparently children makes one care more about silly moralisms with no scientifically provable harm than companies doing blatant bait and switch.
Explains why people who have children are statistically less educated, contribute less to the economy and are less intelligent. But then again correlation does not equal causation and I have the distinct impression that it's rather the inability to think for oneself that both leads to all the silly moralisms and the reproduction because “society says so
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You see it everywhere. We live in a world where people are either obsessed with sex, terrified by it, and often both. Republicans and Democrats are our mainstream (!!!?!) parties, who combined, get over 90% of the vote every single time.
The voters have been united and clear: sex is the top government priority. There literally isn't anything Americans would rather see the government poke their noses into. Sure, some other thing are still deemed important, but they aren't as important.
Re: No wonder (Score:1)
I know there's an internet time "there's porn of everything" but this is taking it too far.
Re: No wonder (Score:1)
Time -> rule
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More likely the generated crap wasn't worth the money, so nobody made any purchases.
I doubt that Onlyfans under Sam Slopman would have worked any better.
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The vast majority of their users are people who don't pay anything. I very much doubt there are many people willing to pay for generated erotic fantasies. If you want to pay for actual people, there's already OnlyFans, Chaturbate, etc.
they could of made it pay pre text SEXCHAT + your (Score:2)
they could of made it pay pre text SEXCHAT + your message to 6969 for chatGPT sex talk all meeages cost 0.99 per text + your phone carriers SMS fees.
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Especially for an administration who's priority is to eliminate pornography as an evil to society and why the US isn't having more babies and getting divorced way too often.
It's in the book. Everything Trump has done has followed Project 2025 (and now Project 2026) book. Getting rid of pornographic materials is pretty much the first chapter.
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Extremely unsafe reputationally, and extremely dubious in terms of profits.
Yup, 'cause there's no money in porn... /s :-)
From Adult Entertainment Market Report 2026 [thebusines...ompany.com]:
- Adult Entertainment market size has reached to $71.63 billion in 2025
- Expected to grow to $109.83 billion in 2030 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.9%
- North America was the largest region in 2025 and Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing region.
(That growth rate is close to the average S&P 500 of 10%.)
They misheard the real announcement (Score:5, Funny)
We said that we will abandon ChatGPT's neurotic mode. What is it with these people?
Looks like panic to me (Score:3)
The last few weeks, they seem to try to actually get closer to making a profit, but apparently with no clear strategy or goal in mind.
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More like the total opposite, I'd say.
I can't imagine what's the business value of having ChatGPT doing a BloodNinja impression. It's not good for PR, it'd risk exclusion in serious environments, school and the like, it'd risk legal trouble, the list goes on. The potential for trouble far outweighs any possibly benefit, which is what? There's only downsides because it'd go wrong in some way sooner rather than later.
No, doubling down on serious, well paying uses and removing controversial ideas of little wor
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No, doubling down on serious, well paying uses...
seems like they need to invent a few of those
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More like you are totally delulu...
I think it's more about resources (Score:2)
Now they have basically unlimited money because they are dangling the possibility of freeing the Epstein class from their long-standing dependency on us filthy filthy peasants.
But the problem is they don't quite have unlimited power and people have noticed how terrible the data centers are for their communities so they can't just keep building them.
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This. My take is that OpenAI started as a lab of sorts, but then their research started showing real results. But, Altman isn't really a great businessman...look at his Wikipedia page. It's basically Y-combinator, get first investment opportunities in a plethora of start-ups, some pay-out, rising tide you are rich. As a visionary he sucks...this erotic business is almost certainly his idea. As a leader he sucks, his previous leadership fired him and walked out, only to be reinstated by Micro$oft to
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Liked your post. I'd add a mention of the book Empire of AI by Karen Hao, which I just finished reading. It's a fascinating study of the rise of OpenAI and the impact of the needs of the AI industry for data and compute-power.
Sam Altman doesn't fare well in the book. He comes across as a duplicitous Napolean-fanboy, who nevertheless managed to develop a cult following amongst his employees. A following that has eroded over time but is still holding. Many ex-OpenAI employees have gone on to create rival comp
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Thx for heads-up on that book, I will pick it up. Agreed, the Altman/OpenAI narrative reads like common saga of "Road to hell is paved with good intentions". Many a politician has walked that path.
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OpenAI said they expect to spend $600bn through to 2030 on compute costs. That's $150bn per year in costs. They are projecting to make $25bn in revenue this year.
They try to get closer to making a profit like I try to get closer to winning an Olympic gold medal by doing a couple of pushups every day.
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True. And it does not look like they even have a snowflake's chance in hell to ever get to profitability without some major breakthrough. And even with that, they will have collapsed long before. The numbers for the competition do not look that much better though, it is just way more obvious for OpenAI.
The whole idea of general LLMs is massively overhyped and cannot deliver on the hype. Large players (Google, Microsoft, potentially Nvidia) may survive because they have enough reserves and other reve
Dirty Sam still Dirty (Score:1)
We call you "Dirty Sam" because you are a horrible person, not because of your porn side hussle.
What dribbling mouth breather... (Score:1)
... ever thought this was a good idea in the first place?? Arn't the tech companies in enough of the brown stuff as it is without realtime AI porn being added to the mix? FFS, fire them before they do any more harm.
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Yeah, what kind of idiot would think of using the internet to make money on porn?
Best to leave that market (Score:2)
Give it a few years. (Score:3, Funny)
Once AI takes all the jobs the prospect of a sexy suicide coach will be appealing not only to investors, but also to governments as a subsidized way to euthanize poor people. They should really just keep this concept in their back pocket until the mass layoffs pick up steam, then roll it back out.
AI-gen adult content (Score:3)
This seems like a great area for this technology. Isn't it the feminist and the evangelicals that both say porn is bad and that it prey's upon vulnerable women? With the use of this technology, no people need be harmed from working in the industry. This enables folks to still consume the content but without people having to do the performances.
I'm more a freedom type person. If people want to do sex work for a living, why not? So long as it's regulated like every other industry and the workers taxed on the income, what's the problem? I'm sure many folks would be quite frustrated at losing this job opportunity.
The extremist in the conversation would do away with all sexual material and work while the rest of us can see the grey area and at the end of the day, shouldn't adults be allowed to make their own choices for themselves?
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I'm more a freedom type person. If people want to do sex work for a living, why not? So long as it's regulated like every other industry and the workers taxed on the income, what's the problem?
If you just put in the tip there is no income tax.
Feminists don't hate porn, misandrists do! (Score:2)
This seems like a great area for this technology. Isn't it the feminist and the evangelicals that both say porn is bad and that it prey's upon vulnerable women? With the use of this technology, no people need be harmed from working in the industry. This enables folks to still consume the content but without people having to do the performances.
I'm more a freedom type person. If people want to do sex work for a living, why not? So long as it's regulated like every other industry and the workers taxed on the income, what's the problem? I'm sure many folks would be quite frustrated at losing this job opportunity.
The extremist in the conversation would do away with all sexual material and work while the rest of us can see the grey area and at the end of the day, shouldn't adults be allowed to make their own choices for themselves?
Porn is irrelevant to feminism. People who oppose legal porn for non-religious reasons have issues with sex....no other reason. It's like drinking. I don't like to drink, some do. However, I don't go around claiming people who enjoy drinking legally are harming women because I am uncomfortable around drunk assholes. I just accept they're into something I find disgusting and not good for me, personally. Porn is a profession with a market. It's no more degrading than driving an uber or cleaning someone
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Sex Fantasies are just too unsafe! (Score:4, Informative)
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Due to safety concerns, we're going to abandon the idea of erotic AI fiction, and re-focus our efforts on powering mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Safety? Let's be real. Due to RAM price realities, AI erotic fiction is fucking more than just minds.
Probably didn't want to be blacklisted by Visa. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Because our corporate overlords spend too much of their time at places like the Bohemian Grove. Throw in some twink porn and they will be suitably distracted.
Sexy Suicide coach? (Score:1)
If we consider that at the same time Reddit is going to be having user-validation issues, it feels like this is a match made in heaven (for the rest of us).
Herbert was right (Score:1)
The Butlerian Jihad cannot come soon enough. Machines should be useful tools serving us, where our emotional connections to them are still based on tool-user and tool.
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Evidently, you have never seen a mechanic screaming at his socket wrench for rounding the head of a bolt off.
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Not only have I seen that, but I have experienced it.
My socket set and ratchet isn't trying to convince me to be in a relationship with it, to be in love with it, to be something of an equal to it.
Even our pets as living beings capable of expressing themselves are not able to communicate at our level.
Large language model AI is attempting to spoof being human, to mimic being us. There are already examples of people becoming very, VERY upset when their AI-boyfriend or AI-girlfriend is taken away by companies
Obligitory (Score:3)
Futurama warned us about this twenty-five years ago: Don't Date Robots! [youtube.com]
See the episode "I Dated a Robot [wikipedia.org]".
Wrong strategy (Score:3)
I support AI research and believe that it will help us solve previously intractable problems in science, engineering, medicine and maybe even economics.
I also believe that OpenAI has made a series of tactical errors that's turning the public against AI.
While other labs kept the tech in the lab, OpenAI released it to the general public. This resulted in excitement and a few fun things, but also a tremendous amount of slop and scams. Meanwhile, pundits and hypemongers constantly and publicly claimed that AI will replace all jobs. When all the public sees is slop, scams and fear of job loss, the angry response is not surprising.
Then, OpenAI wanted to continue their push into pop culture by introducing "adult mode". This waste of electricity serves no useful purpose, but it amplified OpenAI's push into pop culture.
Now, it appears that they realize that they made have made a bad choice, and are dropping adult mode. This is a good step, but they need to go further.
The proper use of AI is as a tool, not as a friend, lover or therapist, and especially not as an addiction
Telling people how to live their lives (Score:2)
We've come full circle to the tech community deciding what's proper for our neighbors. ChatGPT is free to decide not to include adult stuff, and celebrity/CSAM should totally be illegal, but "The proper use of AI is as a tool, not as a friend, lover or therapist, and especially not as an addiction" is how we get the government regulating how adults use the tools at their disposal.
Aside from CSAM and defamatory stuff we don't have the right to decide what's proper for someone else.
Eventually peer to peer tra
Eww.... (Score:1)
Just reading that - "ChatGPT's Erotic Mode" - felt slimy and gross.
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truly. *shudder*
That's it... (Score:2)
OpenAI is definitely headed for bankruptcy. Porn has always been the thing that turbo-charged technological advances. Do you really think VCRs and high-speed Internet were invented for any other reason? :)
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At least they didn't do a Tumblr and have the feature put in, then wait for millions to be using it... and then yank the rug out from under them.
We saw how that ended.
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the "moderation" on this website is hilarious. sam altman was already thrown out of this job, and i get marked down for an idle comment reflecting that fact. Mods are on Team Altman I guess? Go guys! You're doing GREAT lmfao
Someone's mother complained (Score:2)
An "erotic chat" mode would take jobs away from women (mostly older women) who staff all those "talk to a hot babe" phone lines.
Laugh, right. So, would you hire an older woman who'd been a "tradwife" after her asshole husband dumped her for a younger trophy? What job-oriented skills would she have?
And yes, a let friend of mine did that for a while, many years ago.
\o/ (Score:1)
Who'd have guessed a new level of creepy was possible?
Puritans won again (Score:2)
Fortunately there are alternatives.