Person using ChatGPT on a laptop (illustrative image), PHOTO: Peter KovA!A / Dreamstime.com
OpenAI on Thursday announced the latest version of its flagship artificial intelligence model, GPT-5.2, in response to its continued bid to keep up with its rivals. And while GPT-5.2 does well in most benchmarks, there's one metric that OpenAI didn't provide details on: how “erotic” will it be? It looks like we'll find out early next year, Gizmodo reports.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI's Director of Applications, told reporters that “adult mode” will launch for ChatGPT in the first quarter of 2026, The Verge also reports.
The adult-only version of ChatGPT was promised by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, after some users of the chatbot complained that it had been “lobotomized” by the update to the new GPT-5 version. The GPT-4o, the previous model, was notorious for encouraging user responses in almost any situation – despite internal company warnings that the product was dangerously manipulative.
In October, Altman admitted that OpenAI had “reduced” the chatbot's personality in response to growing concerns about users' mental health, after the parents of a 16-year-old boy filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against OpenAI. Among other things, the young man who committed suicide had asked ChatGPT for advice on how to tie a noose before taking his own life.
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OpenAI CEO promises ChatGPT will be able to produce 'erotic material'
The company has responded to these concerns by introducing additional parental controls and new efforts to restrict access to younger users through a “safer” version of ChatGPT that estimates the user's age and directs them to the right experience.
That age-estimation feature remains essential for OpenAI to open the door to “adult” experiences. According to tech site The Verge, CEO Fidji Simo told reporters that the company is still testing the age verification technology and wants to make sure it can correctly identify teenagers and not confuse them with adults before officially launching the separate experiences.
At this point, the promised “adult mode” is irreversibly tied to Altman's specific promise to allow ChatGPT to produce “erotic material.” But Altman later clarified that the idea is to give adult users more “freedom” in how they interact with the chatbot, including the ability for it to develop a more specific “personality” during conversations with the user.
A debatable idea
Gizmodo, another tech site, points out that adults are indeed better equipped than children to remember that they're talking to a chatbot and not a real person, but that it's still questionable to suggest that giving users the ability to attach themselves to a bot's fake personality is beneficial from a safety perspective.
A study published earlier this year in Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that adults who develop emotional connections with chatbots are significantly more likely to have higher levels of psychological distress than those who do not.
Other studies have shown that people with fewer real-life relationships are more likely to confess to chatbots, and even OpenAI has admitted in the past that some users are at risk of becoming emotionally dependent on ChatGPT.
PHOTO article: Peter KovA!A? | Dreamstime.com.
