This week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company would soon allow “erotica” on ChatGPT, reversing a policy that has been in place since the service’s early days. It was an off-handed comment that I’m told by multiple people wasn’t planned and caught the company’s PR team by surprise.
Altman served up an easy target for his critics to ridicule. Still, I think the concept of AI erotica is often misunderstood. For instance, I was surprised to learn when reporting this story a couple of years ago that many, if not the majority, of people using this particular NSFW chatbot service were women. Allowing erotica is not going to suddenly supplant internet pornography, where videos will continue to attract the most eyeballs.
What would potentially be a game-changer is if OpenAI decided to open up its Sora video creation service to erotica. I would wager that will never happen because it would be toxic for the company’s brand. At some point, though, it stands to reason that services like that will start to proliferate. When that happens, nobody will remember the quaint concept of erotic chatbots.