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That’s right. We’ve arrived, people. AI porn is here. Get ready for it. Strap in.
If you missed it, last week, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman broke this news on X:
“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.”
Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Here’s your AI erotica.
This is something we all need to take seriously. Because once you break the seal on a societal taboo like this, the unintended consequences rush in. It’s like in that fairy tale when the Dutch boy stuck his finger into a leak in the dam, and that one small act saved the entire town from being flooded.
That’s the choice that’s in front of all of us. Right now.
So let’s get weird.
The OpenAI Erotica Move Is Tied To Mental Health – I’m Not Making This Up
I honestly don’t care about your opinions on porn. You do you.
My primary issue is the move to adult content and “erotica” (and can we all agree we hate that word?) is being rationalized as the logical next step now that OpenAI has cracked the whole “mental health issues” and “vulnerable users” thing.
Yeah, we figured it out, folks. Solved it. No longer an issue.
“Altman seems to declare an early victory over these problems, claiming OpenAI has “been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues” around ChatGPT. However, the company has provided little to no evidence for this, and is now plowing ahead with plans for ChatGPT to engage in sexual chats with users.’”
Raise your hand if you buy that excuse.
Here’s what’s really going on.
The Adult Industry Is Always Way Ahead on Tech
This is common knowledge. Porn has been the cutting edge of tech since the early 1900s. I don’t know if that’s true, but deep down, we all know it’s true.
In recent times, the adult industry has led the way on technical advancements like online credit card payments, streaming video, VR adoption, 1:1 video, multi-cam chat. Basically any tech advancement that you can think of that could be used for porn today was perfected by, if not invented by, the adult industry.
The reason for that is because the adult industry, more often than not, actually wants to do things the right way. Because if they don’t, no one will want to take on the risk of working with them. Because the backlash for doing things the wrong way can be severe. The adult industry isn’t being altruistic, but they know the swamp they’re sprinting through.
These AI nerds do not.
Adult AI Was Always Going To Happen
Because it’s already been happening.
You don’t have to give the adult industry billions of VC dollars, or the best technical minds, or killer products, or viral marketing campaigns. Porn finds a way.
And OpenAI and the rest of LLM companies now find themselves three to five years behind on the porn front, with a lot of the shady players already using their tech in ways that OpenAI and them boys can’t—yet.
From the TechCrunch article: “The introduction of erotica in ChatGPT is unchartered territory for OpenAI…”
First of all, it’s “uncharted.” It’s always “uncharted.” There is no charter for this kind of thing, but of course that makes me think of a secret dirty society meeting in a back room to discuss which kind of porn is OK and where to draw the line at kink-shaming.
And second of all, the hell it is.
How do I know? Because duh. If you don’t think that every single engineer, male or female, straight or otherwise, young or old, does not have a plan in the back of their minds for, let’s call it, intimate AI companionship… put your hand down, Doris! You’re not fooling anyone.
OpenAI and them boys need to get out ahead of erotica before society catches up. Here’s why.
Where Adult AI Is Heading
Once you let the cat out of the taboo bag, society moves fast.
For example, what started out as nerd-rific stratomatic baseball became fantasy football became daily fantasy sports became sports betting apps and now the sports betting industry is controlled not by Caesars and MGM casino conglomerates, but by daily fantasy pioneers DraftKings and FanDuel.
The similar chain that links adult content is just as sneaky a coup. Facebook to Tinder to OnlyFans to AI relationships, which doesn’t work unless you can eliminate the middle man and still go “all the way.”
Thus, OpenAI needs “erotica” more than PornHub needs AI.
So here we are. And it’s a damn good thing there aren’t any more vulnerable users using AI because…
If You Think AI Is Bad Now
Wait until they put adult content control into the hands of the customer.
We just did this with OpenAI Sora2, and that got real bizarre, real quick. And not to bring this back up, but to show my cred in this slimy space, I mean, the Omegle kid shut down his entire enterprise, stating very clearly that the cesspool its user base was creating with his neat little tool was uncontrollable and became something not worth enabling.
Free expression be damned, he could no longer defend the worst kind of human behavior.
I can assure you that’s exactly what’s going on with AI in the unregulated, dark corners of the internet – the worst kind of human behavior.
And while the vulnerable users issue is indeed the most important, it is not the most critical, because unlike the vulnerable users issue, this issue can’t be “solved” and papered over.
If we don’t have hard, fast, strong gates around the adult side of AI – in every sense of the word “adult” – it will bring out the worst tendencies in the worst people. And it won’t stop with “erotica.”
From the article: “It is unclear whether OpenAI will extend erotica to its AI voice, image, and video generation tools.”
Oh please.
Please, please, please tell me how they plan to combat user-generated celeb porn, revenge porn and much, much worse.
They don’t. They never do. Because those “consequences” are “unintended.” They allow people to opt out after the damage has been done.
Why are we still operating like it’s 1999, and nerds like me weren’t worried about this because the only people using the internet were nerds like me? Leisure Suit Larry? Ha ha! Sure. That’s cute. What’s the harm?
I’ll tell you what the harm is. Lifelike AI companions that will obediently do whatever some sicko tells them to. And an infrastructure that is notoriously terrible at making sure a person is who they say they are. Oh, and a society that can’t stop splitting itself into two sides that only exist to hate the other side.
So yeah. Let’s “treat adult users like adults.” What could possibly go wrong?
Join the good clean fun of over 10K tech professionals on my email list. It gets a little racy after 10pm.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
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Joe Procopio
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