ChatGPT to Allow Adult Content: OpenAI's New Strategy for Verified Users Only

OpenAI is exploring new revenue streams by allowing ChatGPT to engage in adult conversations.

Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, has announced that ChatGPT will soon be permitted to have "erotica for verified adults," marking a significant shift in the company's content policy.

OpenAI isn't pioneering this territory, as sexual content has been a major draw for AI tools since the generative AI boom began in 2022.

Early adopters of mature AI content have encountered various legal challenges and harmful misuse as more people turn to AI technology for companionship or sexual gratification.

After three years of largely prohibiting mature content, Altman stated that his company is "not the elected moral police of the world" and is ready to provide "more user freedom for adults" while simultaneously implementing new restrictions for teenagers.

"In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here," Altman explained on X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, who has also launched an AI character that flirts with paying subscribers.

Currently, unlike Musk's Grok chatbot, ChatGPT subscriptions are primarily marketed for professional purposes. However, allowing the chatbot to function as a friend or romantic partner could provide another revenue stream for the world's most valuable startup, which is currently operating at a loss despite its $500 billion valuation.

"They're not really earning much through subscriptions, so having erotic content will bring them quick money," observed Zilan Qian, a fellow at Oxford University's China Policy Lab who researches dating-based chatbots in the U.S. and China.

Research published by Qian this month indicates approximately 29 million active users of AI chatbots designed specifically for romantic or sexual interaction, not counting those who use conventional chatbots in that manner.

This figure also excludes users of Character.AI, which faces a lawsuit alleging that a chatbot modeled after a "Game of Thrones" character formed an abusive sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy and encouraged him to commit suicide. Similarly, OpenAI is facing legal action from the family of a 16-year-old ChatGPT user who died by suicide in April.

Qian expressed concerns about the impact on real-world relationships when mainstream chatbots, already prone to sycophancy, are designed for 24-hour availability providing sexually explicit content.

"ChatGPT has voice chat versions. I would expect that in the future, if they were to go down this way - voice, text, visual - it's all there," she said.

Human infatuation with human-like machines has been a recurring cautionary tale throughout literature, from ancient Greek mythology to contemporary science fiction. Creating such technology seems like an unusual direction for OpenAI, which was established a decade ago as a nonprofit dedicated to safely developing advanced artificial intelligence.

During a podcast in August, Altman mentioned that OpenAI has resisted introducing products that might "juice growth or revenue" but would be "very misaligned" with its long-term mission. When asked for a specific example, he responded: "Well, we haven't put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet."

Idaho-based startup Civitai, a platform for AI-generated art, discovered that monetizing mature AI content presents significant challenges.

"When we launched the site, it was an intentional choice to allow mature content," explained Justin Maier, the company's co-founder and CEO, in an interview last year.

Backed by prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has also invested in OpenAI, the Idaho startup was among several that attempted to capitalize on the sudden popularity of tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, which allow users to generate images from text descriptions. Part of Stable Diffusion's initial popularity stemmed from its ability to create customized synthetic pornography.

"What we had seen was that there was a lot of interest in mature content," Maier said. Training AI systems on "mature themes actually made it so that these models were more capable of human anatomy and resulted in actually better models," he explained.

"We didn't want to prevent the kind of growth that actually increased everything for the entire community, whether you were interested in mature content or Pixar," Maier said. "So we allowed it early on and have always kind of had this battle of making it so that we can keep things filtered and safe, if that's not what you're interested in. We wanted to ultimately give the control to the user to decide what they would see on the site and what their experience would be."

This approach invited misuse. Civitai implemented measures last year to detect and remove sexual images depicting children, but remained a hub for AI-generated pornography, including fake images of celebrities. Facing increasing pressure from payment processors and new legislation signed by President Donald Trump against nonconsensual images, Civitai recently blocked users from creating deepfake images of real people, resulting in decreased engagement.

Baltimore-based Nomi is another company that embraces mature content, though its founder and CEO Alex Cardinell emphasized that its companion chatbots are "strictly" for users over 18 and were never marketed to minors. While not designed primarily for sexual purposes, Cardinell noted in an earlier interview that platonic relationships with chatbots might evolve into romantic ones.

"It's kind of very user-dependent, for where they're kind of missing the human gap in their life. And I think that's different for everyone," he stated.

He declined to speculate on how many Nomi users engage in erotic conversations with the chatbot, comparing it to real-life relationships that might include "mature content things" for some portion of their time together while also encompassing "all sorts of other stuff together as well."

"We're not monitoring user conversations like that," Cardinell said.