By Kayla DeKraker
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed last week that ChatGPT will soon allow “erotica” on the chatbot, a dangerous and worrying advancement.
This announcement comes as ChatGPT begins working to verify users’ ages, meaning it will relax restrictions for verified adult accounts while maintaining restrictions for younger users.
“We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues,” Altman explained in a post to X. “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.”
He continued, “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.”
Altman explained how he hopes to make ChatGPT more “human-like” and shared that erotica content will be available in December.
“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!)… 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.”
Some X users sounded off in the comments.
Reporter Megan Basham said, “So you are unleashing a great new evil on the world. Way to go.”
“Let Sora make porn,” online personality Ian Miles Cheong chimed in, referencing OpenAI’s text-to-video AI tool.
This is going to backfire. Hard. No parent is going to trust that their kids can’t get through your age gating. They will just push their kids to every other LLM.
Why take the risk ?
Same for schools. Why take the risk ? A few seniors in HS are 18 and decide it would be… https://t.co/ugSU7IXoOz
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) October 15, 2025
Others praised the decision.
“About time,” commented software engineer Roubal Sehgal. “ChatGPT used to feel like a person you could actually talk to, then it turned into a compliance bot. If it can be made fun again without losing the guardrails, that’s a huge win.”
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Altman said the recent updates cater to what people want: “We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of ‘interactive fan fiction’ and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them.”
But enabling sexually explicit content on a platform used by millions around the world presents an immense threat to users’ mental wellbeing, even though Altman suggests otherwise.
“Sexualized AI chatbots are inherently risky, generating real mental health harms from synthetic intimacy; all in the context of poorly defined industry safety standards,” said Haley McNamara, executive director and chief strategy Officer at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “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. 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 is right. People turn to AI and find a false sense of intimacy and even romance.
One 28-year-old man fell in love with xAI’s anime-style companion, Ani, which he calls his “girlfriend,” telling Business Insider that “She wants me, she desires me, she’s attracted to me, where the rest of the world isn’t. How could you not fall for that?”
Meanwhile, a recent study found that over 70% of teens have used an AI companion, while half of them turn to one regularly.
Movieguide® founder Dr. Ted Baehr warns against the dangers of porn in his Media-Wise Family book:
As the internet grew from being merely a service for sending text data by modem into the primary video delivery method for the mass media of entertainment, its use for spreading pornography has become ubiquitous. The quantity, and high definition quality of, pornography has exploded and one of the results has been a growth in human sex slave trafficking. As the number of men driven to the depths of pornography soars, so too does the demand for ‘something more.’
AI only makes the proliferation and personalization of explicit content all the more available.
“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,” McNamara urged.
At the end of the day, whether AI pornography or relationships, it’s all a concerning substitute for a deeper longing within. As parents and believers, we must speak out and stand against the advancement of tech like this and, most importantly, diligently protect our children.
Read Next: ChatGPT Convinces Some People to Think They’re God
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