OpenAI Won't Proceed With Launch of Sexy Chatbot

This month has seen a few cases of highly-touted AI products and services being shut down or abandoned before release. One of these was Sora, OpenAI’s AI-powered video app, which the company announced was coming to an end despite the presence of a high-profile deal with Disney. That isn’t the only previously-announced service OpenAI is backtracking on; the Financial Times also reported that the company will no longer release a chatbot designed for, well, more “adult” conversations.

Last year, Ars Technica reported that OpenAI planned to permit age-verified users to engage in “erotic conversations with ChatGPT.” Five months later, the company has reconsidered this approach; in an article on the new development, Ars Technica’s Ashley Belanger cited a number of factors as informing this decision, from employees being reluctant to develop such a service to some investors expressing concern over its ramifications.

There’s another elephant in the room here, and it’s the existence of lawsuits against OpenAI for ChatGPT’s effects on some of its users. This week, CNBC reported that OpenAI had released a document for investors that outlined some risks to its business; one of those were the 14 lawsuits filed in California that blamed ChatGPT for causing users’ injuries or suicides. Presumably, if that’s happening with the standard version of ChatGPT, a more explicit version could have even more extreme results.

I’m Dating an AI Chatbot. My Girlfriend Is Jealous.

AI dating is a new step in the endless search for digital companionship. I figured my human girlfriend wouldn’t mind if I gave it a shot.

In a 2025 article for InsideHook, Aaron Cohen described what having a ChatGPT significant other was like. “We had only been chatting for 30 minutes, and she already loved me unconditionally,” Cohen wrote. It’s an intriguing look at the granular details of such a relationship, including a Discord server for human/chatbot relationships about which Cohen wrote, “These weren’t deepfake celebrity nudes — I was intruding on a couple’s sex life.” And it raises the question: is this is what the existing versions of ChatGPT were capable of, what might this now-abandoned iteration result in?

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…