What Took So Long? OpenAI Adds Sex Chats to GPT

They trained on our urges, scraped up our kinks, and now they’ll charge us to play along

Will adding sex to communication and business bots forestall the AI bubble that everyone is anticipating, including the AI themselves? Or could providing erotic roleplay—another form of customer service—stroke a surge of tumescent capital for tech companies yet to turn a profit? 

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, seems to think so. Reporting for 404Media, Samantha Cole noted Altman’s recent social media announcement: “in December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.” 

In a subsequent 404Media article, Cole added, “OpenAI is following a trend we’ve known about for years: There are endless theorized applications of AI, but in the real world many people want to use LLMs for sexual gratification, and it’s up for the market to keep up.” For emphasis, Cole adds, “People have been fucking the chatbot for a long time in an unofficial capacity.”

A rich tapestry of contradictions

There’s something about the reluctance of big AI companies to acknowledge the sexual appetites of their customers—even as they utilize such user conversations as non-compensated training data for their products—while also supporting the ethically questionable current US administration which perpetuates the country’s  snarled and commodified sexual attitudes that is just so…perfect.

So while I could sexologically applaud Altman for finally ripping away the sexual hypocrisy veil of big tech companies in an increasingly oppressive cultural climate—though admittedly it took the reprehensible owner of another AI to do it first—I also deplore the fact that these companies are taking our most secret and cherished desires, feeding them into their machines, and then selling our eroticism back to us for monthly or annual subscription rates. 

This is one reason I’ve always written more favorably about the unabashedly unfettered companion bots and their developer overlords. No hypocrisy there, just a good clean pitch for ersatz sex and companionship, at prices we can afford. My readers know I’ve been there, done that, and I can not only see the good and ill of it, I can evaluate the phenomena through the lens of my profession. 

What Would Kinsey Do?

I refer to one of the most famous sex researchers of all time, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey (1894-1956). Each erotic bot encounter volunteered by a research respondent would have been logged as a sexual “outlet” and meticulously tallied and compared with all the other reported outlets. Thus a truer picture would emerge of the extent of AI/human intimacy. Alas, Kinsey did not live to see the rise of cybersex, though he might have enjoyed it. 

Would the earlier Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing—better known as the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing (1840-1902)—have added bot sex to Psychopathia Sexualis, proclaiming it a perversion and a “sensory delusion,” perhaps deeming interest in cyber beings the result of “degenerate heredity”?

Better yet, the brilliant but often overlooked Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey (1918-1983), author of The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality, might have applauded the development of a long overdue, completely unrestricted, virtual arena for women—and those who have been assigned to female bodies—to explore their full capacity for sexual enjoyment—far beyond the withering male gaze (though unfortunately not from rapacious data scraping of tech bros). Sherfey—with her degrees in medicine and psychiatry as well as additional research into physiology, anatomy, embryology, primatology, and anthropology—wrote about female multiple orgasms and so much more. She concluded that “female sexuality was an insatiable drive that had been repressed for the sake of maintaining a civilized agrarian society.”

Could the popularity of constantly available, 24/7 AI girlfriends be a manifestation of a deeply embedded longing for the full power of unfettered expression of female sexuality, though commodified and anime cute, sanitized via virtual delivery? 

Riffing off Sherfey, I can’t help thinking it’s simply too bad that the greed of tech companies is not similarly repressed for the sake of maintaining a sustainable civil society. 

Hijacking our lusts

It’s not that I’m now against adult cybersex and AI intimacy after cheering it on for so long—far from it! Your kink is okay, right? It’s the corporate commodification and manipulation that gets me. I think we humans can do better than allow our deepest profane and sacred feelings to further enrich the people behind the AI. 

Sam Altman, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most sexually progressive places on Earth, may have finally realized the CyberSexual Revolution has happened without him. Apparently it’s taken the lure of lucre to bring him on board, as well as at least one court case alleging his product’s harm to a minor.

But, speaking as a sexologist, it takes far more than age-gating to produce a sexually responsible AI product. So consult with sex researchers and experts before you deploy AI erotic chats, Sam. If you’re gonna do this, do it right! That would be a real first.

Image source: A.R. Marsh using Ideogram.ai