The creators of ChatGPT have responded to outcry over the announcement that it would allow users to create “erotica”.
On Tuesday, OpenAI said that it would allow ChatGPT to create erotica for adults, and announced that it would also relax safeguards that were intended to protect the mental health of its users.
That prompted outcry as users suggested that making it easier to generate AI erotica could cause social damage, as well as potentially being in conflict with the company’s claims to be improving the world and fix its problems.
Now chief executive Sam Altman has attempted to address that outrage, and claimed that he had not expected the announcement that his company would start generating AI erotica for users to prompt so much interest.
He said that it is “not loosening any policies related to mental health” and claimed that it was continuing to try to prioritise safety. But the changes were intended to be a way of “allowing more user freedom for adults”, he said.
“As AI becomes more important in people's lives, allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission,” Mr Altman said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “It doesn't apply across the board of course: for example, we will still not allow things that cause harm to others, and we will treat users who are having mental health crises very different from users who are not.
“Without being paternalistic we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals.
“But we are not the elected moral police of the world. In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here.”
