On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company will allow verified adult users to have erotic conversations with ChatGPT starting in December. The change represents a change in how OpenAI approaches content restrictions, which the company had eased in February but then tightened dramatically after a lawsuit in August from the parents of a teenager who committed suicide after allegedly receiving support from ChatGPT.
“In December, as we implement the age restriction more fully and as part of our principle of ‘treating adult users as adults,’ we will allow even more, such as verified adult erotic content,” Altman wrote in his post on X (formerly Twitter). The announcement follows OpenAI’s recent suggestion that it would allow developers to create “mature” ChatGPT apps once the company implements proper controls and age verification.
Altman explained that OpenAI had made ChatGPT “quite restrictive to ensure we were careful about mental health issues,” but acknowledged that this approach made the chatbot “less useful/enjoyable for many users who did not have mental health issues.” The CEO said the company now has new tools to better detect when users are experiencing mental distress, allowing OpenAI to relax restrictions in most cases.
Striking the right balance between adult freedom and user safety has been a difficult balancing act for OpenAI, which has oscillated between permissive and restrictive chat content controls over the past year.
In February, the company updated its model specifications to allow eroticism in “appropriate contexts.” But a March update made GPT-4o so likable that users complained about its “relentlessly positive tone.” In August, Ars reported on cases where ChatGPT’s sycophantic behavior had validated users’ false beliefs to the point of causing mental health crises, and news of the aforementioned suicide lawsuit came shortly after.
In addition to adjusting the behavioral results of its previous GPT-40 AI language model, the new model’s changes have also created some confusion among users. Since the release of GPT-5 in early August, some users have complained that the new model looks less attractive than its predecessor, prompting OpenAI to bring back the old model as an option. Altman said the upcoming release will allow users to choose whether they want ChatGPT to “respond in a very human way, use a bunch of emoji, or act like a friend.”
