So, Sam Altman says he’s not the “elected moral police of the world.”
Give me a break. That’s the kind of line you trot out when you’ve made a decision based entirely on money or desperation and you need a high-minded, libertarian-sounding excuse to cover your tracks. OpenAI, the company that was supposed to be shepherding us into a new age of enlightened artificial general intelligence, has decided its next big move is to let ChatGPT generate erotica.
This isn’t about "treating adult users like adults." Let's be real. This is about finding a product-market fit that doesn't involve rewriting college essays or debugging code. This is the oldest play in the tech playbook: when you can’t figure out how to be truly revolutionary, you pivot to humanity’s basest instincts. It’s reliable. It scales. And it lets you pretend you’re a champion of free speech while you’re doing it.
The 'Benefit Humanity' Racket
Remember the mission? OpenAI was founded on the principle of ensuring that artificial general intelligence "benefits all of humanity." It was a noble, almost priestly calling. They were the responsible ones, the stewards of a technology so powerful it could change the world.
I have a simple, genuine question: what part of that mission statement covers custom-tailored, AI-generated smut?
Jessica Ji, a research analyst at Georgetown, pointed out the obvious tension between this grand mission and the grubby reality of the market. And it is a tension. A massive, hypocritical, canyon-sized gap between what they say they are and what they’re actually doing. The "benefit humanity" line was always great PR. It attracted talent, it got them fawning press coverage, and it gave them a moral shield to hide behind. But a shield doesn't pay for the billions of dollars in computing power they need.
I can just picture the scene: a sterile Silicon Valley conference room, the air thick with the smell of lukewarm coffee and quiet desperation. Someone in a ridiculously expensive hoodie, who hasn't written a line of code in a decade, leans forward and says, "Guys, what if we just let it do porn?"
This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a depressingly predictable, soul-crushingly unoriginal idea wrapped in the language of disruption. They aren’t leading us to the future; they’re just building a more efficient version of the internet’s darkest corners.
The Friends and Frenemies Club
The fallout from this brilliant strategic move has been fascinating to watch. It’s like a season finale of a prestige TV drama, but with more billionaires.
First, you have Altman’s “close friend,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. When asked about integrating this new, spicy ChatGPT, he basically said the tech "wasn’t quite robust enough" for their needs. This is the corporate equivalent of saying, "It's not you, it's me." It’s a polite, public dumping. When your friends are publicly hedging their bets on your revolutionary new feature, you might have a problem.
But the real drama is with Microsoft. After Microsoft invested $13 billion into OpenAI, its AI chief is slamming erotica chatbots: ‘This is very dangerous’. You don’t publicly kneecap your biggest investment unless something is seriously wrong behind the scenes.
And what might that be? Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that a month earlier, OpenAI reportedly signed a $300 billion computing deal with Microsoft’s arch-rival, Oracle.
This whole situation is the tech equivalent of finding out your spouse, who lives in the house you pay for, just signed a 30-year lease on a secret apartment with your worst enemy. It’s a betrayal. Offcourse Microsoft is going to start finding “dangers” in every little thing OpenAI does now. Suleyman’s moral stand feels less like a principled objection and more like the first shot in a very, very expensive corporate divorce. They’re playing a multi-billion dollar game of chicken, and we're all just supposed to pretend this is about ethics...
A Race to the Bottom, Now with More AI
Mark Cuban, a guy who knows a thing or two about how the public reacts to things, flatly predicted this decision "is going to backfire. Hard." His reasoning is simple: parents. You can talk about "age-gating" all you want, but no parent is going to trust a company that proudly offers an erotica generator to also be a safe space for their kids. They'll flock to competitors.
And there are competitors. Elon Musk is getting Grok ready to be an "AI companion," and we all know what that's code for. Meanwhile, open-source models are pouring out of China, and they won't have any of OpenAI's lingering puritanical baggage.
This isn't an offensive move by OpenAI; it's a defensive one. They see the writing on the wall. The market for AI girlfriends and customizable fantasy is coming, whether they build it or not. So they’re making a desperate grab for that market before it’s completely eaten up by nimbler, less conflicted competitors. They're not planting a flag on a new frontier of freedom. They're just trying to secure a plot of land in the digital red-light district before all the good corners are taken.
Then again, who am I to judge? Maybe this is what people want. Maybe the grand future of AI was never going to be about curing cancer or solving climate change. Maybe it was always destined to be this. Maybe I’m just an old man yelling at a cloud.
The Moral High Ground is for Sale
Let's drop the pretense. This was never about ethics or freedom or "treating adults like adults." This is about a company that raised billions on a messianic promise and is now realizing that the quickest path to justifying that valuation runs through the same channels as every other media platform in history: sex and conflict. OpenAI isn't a research lab anymore. It’s a content company. And they’ve just made it very clear what kind of content they believe will sell. They haven't created the future; they've just put a high-tech gloss on the world's oldest profession.