A national organization has slammed an x-rated ChatGPT update with a warning to its users.
The most recent update announcement from the OpenAI chatbot, which will be available later this year, will include sexually explicit material.
This has sparked a reaction from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation which released a statement saying that move could introduce ‘real mental health harms from synthetic intimacy’.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the news on social media, taking to X, formerly Twitter to say: “We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.
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“Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.
“In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing).
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“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.”
In response to this update, Haley McNamara, who is the executive director and chief strategy officer at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said: “Sexualized AI chatbots are inherently risky, generating real mental health harms from synthetic intimacy; all in the context of poorly defined industry safety standards.
“While [OpenAI’s] age verification is a good step to try preventing childhood exposure to explicit content, the reality is these tools have documented harms to adults as well.
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“We’ve already seen other chatbots emboldened to engage in sexual conversation simulate themes of child abuse or push sexually violent written content on users who asked them to stop.”
McNamara added: “If OpenAI truly cares about user well-being, it should pause any plans to integrate this so-called ‘erotica’ into ChatGPT and focus on building something positive for humanity.”
This news comes after Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, introduced a new 18+ ‘sexy mode’.