An iron law of running a large internet service is that your users will figure out how to use it to share, consume, or make porn. Explicit adult chatbots preceded ChatGPT by many years, and as soon as widely available and far more fluent and flexible LLMs showed up, it was inevitable that a meaningful portion of new users would wonder how far they could push them sexually.

As a result, every big internet company has to figure out what its relationship to porn is going to be. Search engines settled on solutions like SafeSearch, giving users the option of whether they wanted to see adult content; social-media companies drew a wider range of boundaries, from Meta’s systematic prudishness to Tumblr and Twitter’s fairly open embrace of porn; mobile platform companies like Apple and Google kept most adult apps out of their app stores. The boundaries these mainstream companies chose helped shape the outside porn industry, which has been steadily growing alongside them with parallel versions of mainstream platforms. (YouTube becomes YouPorn, etc.)

I’d say it’s early, but adult chat was a use case for LLM-based chatbots from the moment they launched, as every AI firm came to understand as soon as early-user data started coming in. So far, all the big AI companies have come up with slightly different answers to their version of the porn question. Elon Musk is all for it with adult modes and sexualized avatars in Grok (as well as extremely permissive rules for its image-generation tools, which led to instant and widespread abuse). Meta allows “romantic” role-play with guardrails that don’t seem to work very well. Google is being fairly cautious but also partnered early on with Character.ai, a role-playing chatbot........

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