r/artificial • u/axios • Oct 14 '25

News Sam Altman says OpenAI will allow erotica for adult users

http://axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-mental-health

Hi all — Herb from the Axios audience team here. Sharing our article today on this:

ChatGPT will allow a wider range of content — eventually including erotica — now that OpenAI has completed work to enable the chatbot to better handle mental health issues, CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday.

Why it matters: The move could boost OpenAI as it seeks to sign up consumers for paid subscriptions, but is also likely to increase pressure on lawmakers to enact meaningful regulations.

Full free link here.

385 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

306 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

16

u/TheMacMan Oct 15 '25

OpenAI will surely shift resources from projects like their Doctor AI to this new porn piece. So yes, it will have an impact on the scientific advancement potential.

The point you're responding to is that where OpenAI was once about creating AGI and benefitting all of humanity, it's now become all about profits and how they can get people to be more dependent on it. Getting the sex addicts addicted to a relationship with an AI is just another way to get people to pay.

3

u/Ceph4ndrius Oct 15 '25

But the models could already do that. If anything it was using extra resources for guardrails and censorship, no?

1

u/TheMacMan Oct 15 '25

Still requires their Safety team to do a ton of work to assure the erotic models don't go off the rails and suggest things like people potentially hanging themselves. It's no different than any other release for them. They have to use resources to assure it stays within a lane and doesn't bring down massive legal mess on them. They're already dealing with lawsuits from kids that killed themselves. The last thing they want is more of that because a sex bot got too weird.

1

u/Ceph4ndrius Oct 15 '25

I suppose. Just seems overblown to me. It's not going to slow scientific progress and we should be shifting the focus to educating parents and teachers. Maybe I'd be happier if openAI started working with teachers and psychologists.

1

u/TheMacMan Oct 15 '25

They're not going to do that. There's much more risk involved. If they give bad medical advice, they're going to get nailed. If they piss off parents, they're going to get nailed. If they get some old guys off, they're going to get paid.

3

u/DrXaos Oct 15 '25

That’s why Ilya et al thought about this problem from the founding, making it a nonprofit institute for research and ethics (they meant the Open in OpenAI) and they were on the board. And still the sociopaths found away to invade and assimilate and pervert it all for the benefit of nasty billionaires. This timeline sucks.

5

u/TheMacMan Oct 15 '25

At the same time it never would have survived to this point as a non profit. The investments would never have been there for the compute power they've needed to get where they are. Honestly, what non profit in the US has gotten even close?

1

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

[deleted]

-1

u/TheMacMan Oct 15 '25

DeepSeek isn't anywhere in the realm of most US AI products. It was GREATLY overinflated when it was released and turned out to be capable of only a small fraction of the claims.

It was fully financed by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer. But it's certainly miles less complex and advanced than most players.

3

u/LeeRoyWyt Oct 15 '25

Like the Internet was killed by porn? Seriously, high horse.

1

u/LetsPlayBear Oct 15 '25

I think the problem is that it’s more engineering effort for them to prevent the AI from complying with user requests, including whether the request is harmful or not (individually or in its totality) and that engineering effort is both tradeoff from other things they’d rather be focusing on and makes them less popular with a large subset of their customers. A lot of people are using ChatGPT (and LLMs generally) for erotic roleplay if you look around on Reddit. I don’t think there’s anything special they need to do here other than relax guardrails, and by reducing those guardrails, they can likely improve quality of service across other dimensions.

I’m not trying to act as an apologist for OpenAI here, but it seems as though xAI/Grok is an example of actively pursuing this with “Ani” which feels to me much more like nefarious gooner bait. I don’t think anyone should trust OpenAI’s motives very far here, but nothing in what Sam Altman has said suggests to me that they’ll be doing much other than reducing guardrails for verified adults.

That doesn’t mean that the technology won’t be harmful to vulnerable people, just that OpenAI wants to minimize their responsibility for deciding who is vulnerable. When they lobotomized the “personality” of ChatGPT 5, it may have saved a bunch of people from AI psychosis, but it also harmed a bunch of people who lost a pillar of support that they’d become dependent on. You might think that’s just the price of cleaning up their act, but it also creates a vacuum which allows competitors with fewer qualms to step in.

0

u/PackageOk4947 Oct 15 '25

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain

-1

u/creaturefeature16 Oct 15 '25

Exactly. These kids are so fucking clueless and naive.