In an X post on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified that when he said ChatGPT might soon manufacture custom erotica, that “was meant to be just one example of [OpenAI] allowing more user freedom for adults.”
Ok this tweet about upcoming changes to ChatGPT blew up on the erotica point much more than I thought it was going to! It was meant to be just one example of us allowing more user freedom for adults. Here is an effort to better communicate it:
As we have said earlier, we are… https://t.co/OUVfevokHE
— Sam Altman (@sama) October 15, 2025
A post from Altman the previous day had alerted the world to the fact that ChatGPT will soon include “erotica for verified adults,” and Altman now says that post “blew up on the erotica point” more than he thought it would. “Erotica” is a vague term without a technical or legal definition. It seems to be deployed by collectors of old timey nude photos, or when one describes art or literature that can include titillating amounts of sex and nudity, when said art also needs to sound like it has more redeeming aesthetic value than pornography.
So go ahead and picture something sexy coming from ChatGPT, but not too sexy, because that would be porn, and as OpenAI told Mashable last year, “We have no intention to create AI-generated pornography.”
We asked OpenAI to clarify whether it will generate “erotica” in the form of chats only, or whether there will be erotic images produced within the ChatGPT app by its image model, DALL-E—the one that’s so impressive at generating images that look like anime, and which may or may not soon be capable of generating hentai. We will update if we hear back.
The erotica remark in the earlier Altman post was about a coming update aimed at removing safeguards, and ostensibly allowing “verified adults” to chat with a broadly less restricted version of OpenAI’s signature product. As we noted at the time, the more permissive version of the chat app soon to be delivered sounds a bit like OpenAI highlighting the seemingly addictive or parasocial attributes of ChatGPT once again, after the GPT-5 update flopped at least in part because its default tone had become less friendly and supportive.
Many, however, reasonably gleaned the idea that porn—the form of content that gets perhaps 13-20 percent of all search traffic online—is in fact on its way to ChatGPT. One popular post speculated that OpenAI was launching a full-scale invasion of the online porn sphere. That’s not a crazy assumption. OpenAI is expected to have cash outflows of around $115 billion between now and 2029, and Altman has been explicit about his company needing to find ways to bring in revenue, even if—as with the launch of Sora 2—OpenAI gets criticized for poor taste. Sora 2’s tsunami of slop videos is justified, Altman says, because it makes people smile, and can “hopefully make some money given all that compute need.” Well, some analysts have estimated the value of the porn industry at close to $200 billion. A piece of that action would build an awful lot of compute.
On the internet, wild speculation that OpenAI is getting into porn, or porn-adjacent “erotica,” to drive revenue is inevitable given what the company’s CEO is teasing here. If Altman’s intent is to kick off another version of the 1980s home video revolution in order to bring in the cold hard cash his company so desperately needs, content for horny people who aren’t all that discerning would be a historically grounded, if tacky, way to speed up revenue growth.
So no, OpenAI hasn’t yet clarified where the sexy stuff will come out of the AI pipes, and whether it will be text, photos, or even video. But Altman even struck a rather Larry Flynt-like, free-speech-warrior tone in his clarifying post, saying that “allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of [OpenAI’s] mission,” and adding that he and his company “are not the elected moral police of the world.”
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