OpenAI has indefinitely shelved plans to release an erotic chatbot as the company shifts focus to its core products amid concerns among employees and investors about the impact of sexualized content generated by artificial intelligence on society.
The Financial Times writes about this.
OpenAI says it wants to conduct long-term studies on the impact of sexually explicit chats and emotional attachment before making a decision on the product.
The company has decided to abandon secondary projects and focus on useful tools for work. It wants to combine various products — such as programming assistants and ChatGPT — into one universal “super app”. On March 24, OpenAI also announced that it was shutting down its Sora video generator and social app.
The erotic model has proven particularly controversial at a time when tech companies like Meta and X are facing legal action for the harm their products cause to children.
The flirting from OpenAI’s chatbot has raised concerns among some of its investors, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The adult mode has also raised concerns among staff about whether developing a product that encourages romantic relationships runs counter to its core mission of ensuring AI benefits all of humanity.
OpenAI has struggled to train its AI models to generate explicit content, two people said. The AI has previously avoided such conversations for security reasons. The sources added that using data that contains sexual content poses challenges, including the need to rule out illegal behavior.
Code in the ChatGPT web app suggests that an adult model called Citron mode could require users to verify they are over 18 to access it. Over the past few months, OpenAI has introduced a new age prediction system after several lawsuits were filed by families of teenagers who claim ChatGPT harmed them. But the technology has an error rate of more than 10 percent, according to one source — raising concerns about underage access.
- OpenAI reported the “adult mode” in October. A month earlier, it announced that it would limit ChatGPT’s responses to users it considered underage. The decision came after a lawsuit from the family of a 16-year-old who committed suicide after several months of interacting with the chatbot.
- In February, the company fired one of its top security executives, Ryan Baermeister, citing sexism toward a male colleague. However, Baermeister was also critical of the idea of “adult content” for ChatGPT. Before her firing, she told colleagues that the mode would be harmful to users and complained about insufficient mechanisms to protect children.
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