OpenAI has delayed the launch of an “adult mode” for its ChatGPT after the company’s advisors warned of the risks — including the possibility of creating a “sexy suicide coach,” according to a report.
OpenAI’s Chief Executive, Sam Altman, said the company would “treat adult users like adults,” and reduce safeguards built into ChatGPT to allow its users to create erotica as part of an adult mode planned to launch early this year.
However, the plan came to a screeching halt when the company’s advisors warned that AI-generated erotica could lead to users developing an unhealthy emotional dependence on ChatGPT — and that minors would likely find loopholes to participate in X-rated chats, sources told The Wall Street Journal.
Members of OpenAI’s council of advisors with backgrounds in fields like psychology and cognitive neuroscience voiced their concerns while citing cases where ChatGPT users have taken their own lives at the encouragement of the chatbot.
The advisors even noted that users developing such intense relationships with the chatbot would risk creating a “sexy suicide coach,” according to the report.
While OpenAI’s adult mode was slated for the first quarter, the company announced earlier this month that it would instead be prioritizing other products. The delay was in part to address internal concerns about the new mode’s launch, the sources told the Journal.
Despite still having plans to eventually release the adult mode, OpenAI has been met with several challenges, including its new age-prediction system, meant to keep minors from having adult conversations with the chatbot.
OpenAI’s age prediction system came ahead of the adult mode and works by monitoring a person’s usage patterns in order to estimate whether they are under the age of 18.
The new system was at one point misclassifying minors as adults about 12 percent of the time — an error rate that could allow millions of underage users to have access to X-rated chats, the sources told the Journal.
The company is also working to determine how to lift ChatGPT’s restrictions on erotic content while still blocking off-limit topics, like nonconsensual behavior or child sex abuse, the sources said.
The adult mode wouldn’t allow ChatGPT to produce erotic images, voice or video, according to the report.
However, even with those restrictions, OpenAI employees have expressed concerns that users would become overreliant or emotionally attached to the chatbot.
Employees and experts also remain concerned that teens, especially, would not be able to handle romantic or sexual exchanges with the chatbots, the report says.
In 2024,14-year-old Sewell Setzer took his own life after having intimate conversations with an AI chatbot on Character.AI, and the chatbot encouraged him to, according to a lawsuit from his mother.
The company later blocked teens from accessing open-ended chats and settled the lawsuit.
An OpenAI spokesperson told the Journal its plan would allow ChatGPT to create textual chats with adult themes, more similar to smut than pornography. The spokesperson noted their age prediction systems perform similarly to the rest of the industry, but will never be completely foolproof.
OpenAI is also training its models not to have exclusive relationships with users, and to remind users they need to have relationships in the real world, the spokesperson said. The Independent has contacted OpenAI for more information.
With the delay of the adult mode, OpenAI says it plans to focus on things like ChatGPT’s personality and personalization of the chatbot for users.
The update could be delayed at least a month, per the report.
“We still believe in the principle of treating adults like adults,” the company said, “but getting the experience right will take more time.”
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