OpenAI announces that it will introduce, from December, the possibility to access content for adults on the ChatGPT platform. Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, says the decision is part of OpenAI’s efforts to a “treat adult users as adults”.
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In a post on X on Tuesday, Sam Altman said that future versions of the popular chatbot will be able to behave in a more human way — “but only if users want it, not because we want to maximize usage,” writes the BBC.
This move, reminiscent of xAI’s (Elon Musk’s company) recent introduction of two sexually explicit chatbots in Grok, could help OpenAI attract more paying subscribers.
At the same time, it is likely to increase pressure on lawmakers to introduce stricter regulations on chatbots of the “companion”.
Altman stated that OpenAI had previously made ChatGPT “restrictive enough to be mindful of mental health issues’.
These changes were announced in a blog post in August, but no longer appear on the OpenAI website.
“We realized this made it less useful/enjoyable for many users who didn’t have mental health issues, but given the seriousness of the situation, we wanted to make sure we got it right,” Altman wrote on Tuesday.
He said that ChatGPT may soon relax the restrictions “now that we’ve been able to reduce serious mental health issues and have new tools.”
He added: “In December, with the expansion of age verification and as part of our principle of treating adults as adults, we will allow even more, including erotica, for users verified as adults.”
The changes come after OpenAI was sued earlier this year by the parents of a US teenager who took his own life.
Written erotica does not require age verification in the UK under the Online Safety Act. But pornographic images, including those generated by artificial intelligence, will require proof that users are over 18.
In the United States, critics say OpenAI’s decision to allow erotic content on the platform shows the need for stricter regulation, both at the federal and state levels.
“How are they going to make sure that minors can’t access the adult parts of ChatGPT that offer erotic content?”asked Jenny Kim, a partner at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.
Kim is embroiled in a lawsuit against Meta, which claims Instagram’s algorithm is harming the mental health of teenagers.
“OpenAI, like most big companies in the field, uses people as guinea pigs”she said.
In April, TechCrunch reported that OpenAI was allowing accounts registered as minors to generate explicit erotica.
The company said at the time that it was working on a solution to limit this type of content.
