OpenAl's pivot to porn is problematic – but lucrative

Erotic role-play via ChatGPT will be able to tap a big potential market.

- Parmy Olson

When you're building artificial intelligence to benefit humanity, you might have to compromise.

AI is expensive, so you raise billions of dollars from investors like Microsoft, Nvidia and the United Arab Emirates. As you strive to build super-intelligent computers that will cure cancer, you also need to make money for your backers. So, after pitching your powerful chatbot technology to businesses, who struggle to make it useful, your next option may be monetising your enormous user base of 800 million weekly visitors with a sex bot.

That’s the ignoble trajectory of OpenAI under Mr Sam Altman, who’s made a career of justifying opportunistic business moves like inflating the AI bubble with circular deal-making or releasing a TikTok clone - with the promise that his tech will eventually, one day, solve intractable human problems. There’s little evidence that OpenAI’s systems will do that, but in the short term it can make some money, especially with erotic role-play.

This December, ChatGPT will be imbued with more personality and the ability to engage in “erotica” with verified adult users, Mr Altman brazenly announced on X. The news was met with some repulsion on X but celebrated on Reddit, where many ChatGPT users have spent the last two years sharing tricks for jailbreaking the bot to sext with it.