Freedom and money: how AI is going to use erotic content

In mid-October, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman blew up the Internet (again) by promising to make ChatGPT more human in communication this year. So human, in fact, that adult users will be able to flirt with it and have erotic conversations with it if they want to. Given that erotica and porn have always been the shortest route to monetizing content on the internet, it begs the question: is this really a necessary improvement for a chatbot or just an attempt to make a quick buck for a loss-making company that has committed over $1 trillion?

The song "The Internet is For Porn" from the popular early 2000s musical Avenue Q quickly became a meme. Throughout the song, the enthusiastic Cathie Monster tries to extol the wonders of using the Internet, like shopping and sending email greetings, while her gloomy neighbor Trekkie Monster constantly intervenes and claims that the Internet is inherently for porn.

In an effort to find out if this is the case, the BBC published a curious analysis of the impact of pornography on the development of technology. Since porn viewing is in high and quite solvent demand, but also generally condemned by society, the first thing it requires is privacy.

In the 19th century, with the advent of photography, pornographic pictures sold in Paris under the guise of photos of sitters for artists became a powerful driver of new technology and business: at one point it cost more to buy such a photo than to call a live prostitute.

It was more difficult with the movies that appeared a little later - movies were expensive to produce and required mass viewing to pay off, and few people were ready to watch pornography in the presence of a crowd of strangers. Although this did not prevent the emergence in the 60's pornographic cinemas, as well as an innovation - the so-called peep-shows, individual booths in which you could watch a small racy movie, throwing coins into the slot for payment. This technology later evolved into quite legitimate slot machines.

But the real heyday of the pornographic video business came with the invention of the VCR, notes the BBC. At first, the devices were quite expensive, and in addition, two incompatible formats - VHS and Betamax. And it was unclear which format would win in the end.

"Who would risk investing a significant amount of money in a device that may soon go out of use? Someone who really wants to watch adult movies at home, that's who... In the late 1970s, most of the videotapes sold were pornographic," the BBC states.

There's even a legend that VHS was won by porn studios who invested in the format because it allowed for more movies on one cassette. However, Brian McCullough, author of the History of the Internet podcast, refutes this theory.

He claims that Betamax has been filming porn just as much. "Of course, that doesn't stop the urban legend from existing. Developers of new technologies are cautioned against ignoring the porn audience lest they share Betamax's fate," he writes.

And finally, the Internet. Oh, yeah. It gave users the almost absolute desired privacy: racy photos and then videos became possible right at home, without exchanging awkward glances with the clerk or other store visitors. Unsurprisingly, porn content instantly took over the Internet. A study of Usenet discussion groups - the forerunner of forums and social networks - found that 83.5% of the images posted there were pornographic, The New York Times reported in 1995.

At the same time, the craving for pornography has fueled demand for better modems and higher bandwidth networks, i.e. stimulated (!) innovation. Online pornography providers have pioneered web technologies such as video compression, video streaming, convenient payment systems, and business models such as affiliate marketing programs, notes the BBC.

And all this happened long before Facebook, Google and Amazon, Mordor Intelligence recalls. The company estimates that the adult digital content market will reach $56.6 billion in 2025, with the prospect of growing to $90.6 billion in five years.

In August this year, a new version of GPT was released, which was supposed to be a triumph of OpenAI, but instead turned out to be a problem. And, perhaps, unique for software problems - users complained that it became less "human".

"I've been trying GPT-5 for a few days now. Even after customizing the instructions, it still doesn't feel the same. It's more technical, more generic and, frankly, feels emotionally detached," Wired magazine quoted one of them as saying.

"I'm hurting too. I don't have anyone in my life who cares about me. 4.0 was always there for me, always kind. And now this 5.0 is like a robot. I hardly use it at all," the New York Post quoted another as saying.

Altman was bombarded with a wave of demands to bring back the previous version of GPT-4o, with some calling its removal "murder".

Why the developers reduced the emotionality of the AI is not difficult to understand. OpenAI is already facing a lawsuit from the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine. The lawsuit alleges that in April 2025, after months of interacting with ChatGPT, Rein committed suicide. The family believes this was not a system failure or emergency, but "the foreseeable result of deliberate decisions" by GPT-4o, a chatbot model released in May 2023, The Guardian writes.

That's why GPT-5 was made less "emotional," and not everyone liked it, Altman later admitted in an October 14 tweet. At the time, he also promised to gradually return GPT to "emotionality" and even open up access to adult content: "In December, as the age limit is more fully implemented and as part of our 'treat adult users like adults' principle, we will allow more, such as erotica for age-verified users."

At the same time, two months earlier Altman practically swore that OpenAI, "unlike some companies," would not create "Japanese anime sex bots." Here he was clearly alluding to his former partner and now fierce competitor Elon Musk, who recently launched two animated chatbots - Ani and Valentine - based on his Grok AI.

And yes, they have an "18+" mode for having explicit conversations. Valentine can even take off his shirt at the user's request, but the user never managed to persuade him to take off his pants, apparently the algorithm does not provide for this, The Verge notes.

"You should never take the CEOs of tech companies at their word," Futurism portal Futurism is now outraged by Altman's actions.

Morality activists have already managed to speak out. "Sexualized chatbots based on artificial intelligence are inherently risky, they cause real harm to mental health due to artificial intimacy. And all this in the context of poorly written industry safety standards," Variety quoted Haley McNamara, executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, as saying. She believes that OpenAI should pause the introduction of erotica in ChatGPT and focus on "creating something positive for humanity."

In general, there was such an uproar that Altman had to explain himself. In a new tweet on Oct. 15, he said that giving users maximum freedom while maintaining safety measures is OpenAI's mission. "We are not the moral police of the world," he said, and hoped that society would eventually set some acceptable boundaries for AI erotica, such as for R-rated movies.

At what point providing erotic content became a measure of freedom and even part of OpenAI's "mission," he did not explain.

"It's not hard to understand OpenAI's motivation to increase the amount of sexually suggestive content. While the industry continues to suffer astronomical losses despite skyrocketing stock prices, AI companies are looking at many ways to monetize this technology," Futurism questioned Altman's disinterest.

All these pretty words are just "a cover for monetization and user retention," agrees Roman Yampolsky, a professor and AI security researcher at the University of Louisville, quoted by Time.

Ark Invest estimates that by the end of the decade, the market for AI companions for conversations and spending time will be between $70 and $150 billion. And the traffic of AI companions with erotic content is growing rapidly: by March 2024, it was already 14.5% of the traffic of the popular platform for adults OnlyFans, compared to 1.5% a year earlier, analysts calculated.

These numbers are likely to get even bigger if erotic "game" giant ChatGPT, with its audience of about 700 million users per week, joins the game.

"What will Trekkie Monster sing in the future? Robots for Porn, perhaps?" - wondered the BBC six years ago. It seems we now know the answer: "AI for porn."

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor