OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently attended a dinner with a small group of reporters, and apparently had a lot to say about the company, the future of AI, and some of its potential applications (via The Verge). No great surprises there. However, when it comes to, perhaps less savoury uses of the tech, Altman appears to have put his foot down quite firmly.
Speaking to the assembled dinner-attendees about those that develop parasocial relationships with ChatGPT, Altman said:
“There are the people who actually felt like they had a relationship with ChatGPT, and those people we’ve been aware of and thinking about. And then there are hundreds of millions of other people who don’t have a parasocial relationship with ChatGPT, but did get very used to the fact that it responded to them in a certain way, and would validate certain things, and would be supportive in certain ways.
“You will definitely see some companies go make Japanese anime sex bots because they think that they’ve identified something here that works. You will not see us do that. We will continue to work hard at making a useful app, and we will try to let users use it the way they want, but not so much that people who have really fragile mental states get exploited accidentally.”
It’s possible that Altman could be referencing Elon Musk’s competing AI product, Grok, which has recently hit the headlines for offering an anime-style AI companion to its chatbot service. Many X users have responded completely normally to its integration, choosing to ignore the potentially explicit implications and… ah, who am I kidding, they’ve been thirsting over it, in ways I do not wish to link to here. I’m at work, and maybe so are you. Open the following thread with caution.
The Grok app has since added a “spicy” mode to its AI image and video generator that has been accused of creating NSFW deepfakes of Taylor Swift and others with surprising and unsettling ease. While Musk has previously blamed Grok’s work-unfriendly content generation (like referring to itself as MechaHitler) on a tendency for the bot to be “too compliant to user prompts”, its new ability to create pornographic content for its users appears to be very much intentional.
On the one hand, it’s pleasing to see that Altman appears to be aware of the potential pitfalls of creating an AI bot that services its users’ relationship and sexual needs without restraint. On the other, more cynical hand, ChatGPT has already got itself into trouble regarding potentially mental-health-damaging relationship advice, and Altman and Musk are far from the best of friends.
The two have been openly squabbling over Musk’s recent claims that Apple violates antitrust laws by promoting ChatGPT over other AI apps on the iOS App Store, with Musk claiming that “Scam Altman lies as easily as he breathes”. OpenAI is also in the process of countersuing Elon Musk, after he sued both the company and Altman in an attempt to stop him from converting OpenAI to a for-profit operation. The two may have co-founded one of the biggest names in AI together back in 2015, but since then I think it’s fair to say their relationship has degraded by a significant degree.
So, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an attempt to take a dig at both Musk and Grok, all the while making OpenAI look like it was taking the moral high ground. Still, no Japanese anime sex bots in ChatGPT, or any other OpenAI product, for you, says Altman. If only there was somewhere else on the internet you could get that sort of content.
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