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ChatGPT is turning up the heat and will generate "erotica for adults," starting in December.
The move comes more than a year after OpenAI said it was exploring how to let people create NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts through its API and ChatGPT.
But first, it had to at least partially address "serious" mental health concerns with its chatbot, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman writes on X today, particularly for teens, following an August lawsuit in which parents accused the chatbot of encouraging their 16-year-old son to take his life.
"We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues," he says. "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.
"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," he adds.
First, OpenAI will release a new version of ChatGPT that features more personality, including human-like responses, emoji, or role-playing as a friend—whatever the user prefers.
When OpenAI released GPT-5 over the summer, some complained that it was less friendly than its predecessor, GPT-4o, prompting calls to revert to the old model. (OpenAI complied, in part.) At the time, Altman noted that some people's attachment to his chatbot made him "uneasy," especially when they ask it for advice on major life decisions. He claims that adding back more personality is "not because we are usage-maxxing " (trying to get more users at any cost), and will only be an option "if you want it."
Altman will most likely not be one of those people. He found GPT-4o's friendliness "annoying." Its constant affirmation of the user also bordered on dangerous, becoming sycophantic and encouraging delusions, as the company discussed in an April blog post.
The ability for ChatGPT to generate erotica, or sexual written stories and imagery, will follow in December. By then, OpenAI will have rolled out "age-gating more fully," as Altman puts it. The company is prepping an automatic age-verification system that aims to automatically detect the age of logged-in users and block mature topics from teens. Once that's in place, OpenAI will be free to "treat adult users like adults," Altman says. (And it will let developers create "mature" apps, The Verge reports.)
We'll have to see how it stacks up against Elon Musk's sexy anime chatbot on Grok.
Whatever OpenAI comes up with, it's likely to consume a lot of computing resources. That requires GPUs, which are expensive. Altman admitted that the Sora 2 image generator is mostly an entertaining money grab to offset the cost of GPUs. Sexy content could fall in a similar category.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.