Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
Our new robot overlords are not that different from our old robot overlords, at least when it comes to sex.
As far back as the 4th century B.C.E., the Taoist philosopher Liezi wrote a story about an inventor who presented a life-sized automaton to the Chinese king. The machine danced. It sang. It winked at and made advances toward the women of the royal court, which greatly angered the king, who had the inventor executed on the spot and the machine taken apart, where he discovered that all its internal organs were made of leather, wood, glue and lacquer — a bit like the insides of Donald Trump!
Nothing’s changed in the centuries since then. This week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman (who looks like he really wants you to come and watch his band: “We play acoustic versions of jazz-rock classics.” “No thanks, I’m busy.”) announced that ChatGPT will soon allow erotic material.
First up, a new version of ChatGPT that will allow you to customize your artificial intelligence assistant’s personality (I’m going to have mine set to “passive-aggressive regional manager of an insurance company.”)
“If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing),” Altman added — and the part in parentheses has strong added-in-by-the-legal-team-because-we-don’t-want-to-scare-people vibes.
There was more and it was, er, saucy.
“In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults,” Altman said, which is a sentence that manages to be both forward-looking and backward-looking at the same time (Schrödinger’s Chat?).
“Treat adults like adults” sounds like the kind of slogan that a Viktor Orbán or a Nigel Farage would use to bemoan the modern world — “Remember when adults were treated like adults and used to make their own decisions, not have them dictated by the nanny state?” Yeah, and people used to die of cholera and be sent down the coal mines at age 7.
Anyway, Altman didn’t give any details about what ChatXXX would actually look like but I think we can all agree that it’ll be about as sexy as being forced to listen to an endless loop of speeches by Valdis Dombrovskis.
Plus, permanent access to AI erotica could be dangerous in the workplace and lead to repeats of the incident involving former British MP Neil Parish, who in 2022 admitted he had twice watched pornography in the House of Commons chamber.
Parish, who is a farmer, told the BBC: “Funnily enough it was tractors I was looking at. I did get into another website that had a very similar name and I watched it for a bit, which I shouldn’t have done.” For the purposes of research, I have googled the intersection of pornography and heavy agricultural machinery and am now wanted by the police.
For those who are less concerned with the erotic possibilities of AI and more worried about if it will take your job (that reminds me, we need to talk — ed), fear not: It’s still massively flawed. We know that because Boris Johnson has been using ChatGPT to help him write his books.
“I just ask questions,” Johnson admitted. “You know the answer but ChatGPT always says: ‘Oh, your questions are clever. You’re brilliant. You’re excellent. You have such insight.’”
Praising Boris Johnson? AI is either seriously defective or someone set the “irony” button to 11.
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“So we’re agreed, loser of the staring contest has to be French prime minister.”
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Last week, we gave you this photo:
Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best one from our mailbag — there’s no prize except the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far preferable to cash or booze.
“So, they tell me you’ve been with Goldman Sachs, then Bank of Canada, then Bank of England, and even Bloomberg! You finally figured out the real money’s in politics, eh?”
by Frederic Myers
The post ChatXXX: AI’s plans to get sexy appeared first on Politico.
