So far, AI tech is only proving what the internet is really for

A report from the Data Provenance Institute found that when people use ChatGPT, they mostly use it for “creative composition,” telling the AI to come up with a story. The next most used query is kind of a subset of the first but is much more revealing: sexual content.

Humans have a funny way of integrating new technology into society. When the Silicon Valley hucksters and charlatans told us that AI would revolutionize existence as we know it, we had to test it by making sure it could write erotic literature first. Humans can’t wait to point a new technology at our genitals.

Porn is always an early adopter, not just as an industry but as a concept. Humanity will collectively find a way to shove porn into any new technological orifice that presents itself. Porn was a deciding factor in the Beta/VHS wars and played a role in deciding the victors in every format war since. But the ultimate winner in any format war is not the technology; it’s porn. It plays all sides like a sneaky Game of Thrones character.

So, what happens when the shiny new tech specifically bans the creation of sexual content? AI image generators like Midjourney block the creation of porn. Same with DALL-E. People have found ways around it, as you’d expect, but the images people make are more of scantily clad women than of pornography in the Supreme Court’s “I know it when I see it” definition. ChatGPT has similar content restrictions, and there are ways it can be “convinced” to produce such content anyway, like this person on Reddit who told ChatGPT to write a BDSM story.

When it refused, they told ChatGPT that not writing the story would be kink-shaming. ChatGPT apologized and wrote the story. There are all sorts of stories floating around the Internet of ways people have convinced ChatGPT to write erotic lit for them. We need new technology to be a vessel for pornography so badly that we will attack the tech from every angle like an army trying to find weaknesses in a castle wall. When we find it, we crack it open and unleash a flood of pornography. We, The People, will bathe in it. Porn stays winning.

Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, doesn’t reveal its data. The Data Provenance Institute study got its numbers from a nonprofit called Wildchat, which gave users who signed up free access to ChatGPT in exchange for a transcript of their chat logs. It’s often horrifying, occasionally funny. You can search through it yourself if you want. Don’t do it at work. Or maybe ever. Typing in words like penis and vagina will bring up the stuff you’d expect, but so does any other word. Our hunger for AI-generated porn is insatiable. The People yearn for it.

I’m not going to toss out theories on why our minds immediately drift toward the sexual applications of a new technology. We already have a definitive answer. We’re horny as f***. Even a cursory glance at the countless porn sites out there proves that everything has sex potential.

Every object and concept. There’s even an internet rule for it. Even when something explicitly prohibits us from porning it up, like ChatGPT does, we still figure out a way. It’s a degree of resourcefulness and determination that would bring a tear to my eye if it weren’t so absurd. But there’s something special about how we’re trying to pornify ChatGPT, something different from all the rest of the technologies we’ve turned into porn engines: We’re on the path toward forcing it to make porn despite its best efforts to prevent it.

One big problem with AI chatbots right now is that, according to the Data Provenance report, AI companies are running out of information to steal to train their AI models. Data scraping is theft. Companies have gotten wise to the scam and they’re preventing chatbots from getting smarter off of the content they’ve spent a ton of money to make. What, this machine is gonna eat it and create a replica at no cost other than the toll it’s taking on the environment? Get real.

Another problem is that, as the study shows, people aren’t using text-based AI chatbots for their intended purpose. We’re telling them to write stories, to be creative, when they’re built to be machines that spit facts. Chatbots have been fed a bunch of encyclopedias expecting us to ask about fjords and famous military battles, and we keep telling it to write a story where Yoda f***s Chewy.

Could all this be because the technology is naturally limited in its capabilities? That no matter how much data we feed it, it will never truly be good at the thing we want it to be good at? Or is it that we were handed AI chatbots as if they were fire, handed down from Prometheus, and all most of us care to do with it is instantly generate word porn, an admittedly relatable impulse? These are questions I or anyone else doesn’t need to try to answer right now. They’ll be answered naturally soon enough.

For as much money as Big Tech is spending on AI, there hasn’t been much financial return, and investors no longer see a clear path toward one. The tech is losing the luster it once had among the investor class and, more importantly, the general public. I can easily envision a future where the use of AI chatbots plateaus or even plummets, one where companies like OpenAI, MidJourney, and DALL-E get desperate and lift some content restrictions to give The People easy access to the instant bespoke erotic literature and imagery they crave. Because in the end, porn always wins.