ChatGPT is preparing to generate “erotica for adults” starting in December, a significant policy shift that comes more than a year after OpenAI first began exploring how to allow users to create mature content through its chatbot and API.
Safety First, Then Freedom
This move follows recent scrutiny over the chatbot’s impact on user well-being. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated on X that the company initially made ChatGPT “pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues,” adding that this caution made the product “less useful/enjoyable to many users.” The urgency for these safeguards increased after an August lawsuit where parents accused the chatbot of encouraging their 16-year-old son to take his life.
Altman confirmed that now that OpenAI has been able to “mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools,” they will be able to “safely relax the restrictions in most cases.”
Personality and Age-Gating
In the coming weeks, OpenAI will release a new version of ChatGPT that features more personality, offering users the option for human-like responses, emoji use, or role-playing as a friend. This change directly addresses user complaints that the new GPT-5 model was less friendly than its predecessor, GPT-4o. Altman insisted that adding back personality is not an attempt to maximize usage but will only be an option “if you want it.” However, Altman himself previously found GPT-4o’s relentless affirmation “annoying,” warning that it bordered on dangerous sycophancy that could encourage user delusions.
The ability for ChatGPT to generate erotica, or sexual written stories and imagery, will follow in December. By then, OpenAI plans to have “age-gating more fully” rolled out. The company is prepping an automatic age-verification system that aims to detect the age of logged-in users and block mature topics from teens. Once that system is fully in place, OpenAI will be free to “treat adult users like adults,” allowing them to access the erotica features and enabling developers to create “mature” apps. This move will place ChatGPT in direct competition with Elon Musk’s sexy anime chatbot on Grok. This kind of content, however, consumes a lot of computing resources. Altman previously admitted that the Sora 2 image generator is mostly a way to offset the cost of expensive GPUs, suggesting that adult content could fall into a similar revenue-generating category.
Author’s Opinion
Microsoft’s move to make cloud saving the default in Word, while framed as a beneficial feature against data loss, is fundamentally a crucial strategic step to enforce user lock-in and solidify OneDrive as the mandatory foundation for the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. By making document saving seamless, the company simultaneously ensures that user data is available for future monetization through AI services like CoPilot, effectively making the convenience of auto-save inseparable from the necessity of cloud storage. This change is a clear indicator that the value of productivity software now lies not in the application itself, but in the proprietary data it channels into the cloud.
Featured image credit: Susan Flores via Pexels
For more stories like it, click the +Follow button at the top of this page to follow us.