OpenAI boss Sam Altman has announced that ChatGPT will soon permit adult subscribers to create custom erotica. The move will no doubt amplify the already-growing calls for Congress and other public authorities to impose meaningful regulation on AI-generated adult content, and the technology more broadly.

The moral and legal questions are grave, but AI erotica’s deepest threat is to our ability to fantasise, as machine hyperreality overrides the sense of mystery — what’s left unseen — that fuels the erotic imagination.

Start with the humdrum moral issues. The most obvious one is users’ ability to create erotica involving underage persons, real or imagined. The legal status of such content — sexual animation or simulated images involving children, or so-called virtual child porn — varies by jurisdiction. In a 2002 ruling, the US Supreme Court struck down such bans as violating the First Amendment, but UK law does prohibit virtual child sexual abuse images. Even if OpenAI explicitly prohibits this abhorrent category of content, users may be able to trick the platform into generating such images all the same, and taking advantage of the uneven legal landscape to flood the UK and other markets that have sought to restrict them.

Another concern is the platform’s potential use for generating erotica featuring real people — celebrities, public figures, or private individuals — which constitutes an ultimate form of revenge porn. While OpenAI may restrict such content, history shows that technology is often repurposed, sometimes perversely, by determined users.

Even if OpenAI and regulators manage these risks, there is a deeper question: the impact on human erotic fantasy. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued, modern technology drives toward “hyperreality” — simulations that become “more real than the real”. In such a world, signs and representations can surpass reality, conjuring images more perfect than life itself.

The gap — between the signifier and signified — is essential to erotic fantasy, which in turn makes possible sexual encounters between subjects. Fantasy allows the mind to overcome the animal absurdity of the sex act itself, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues. A refined erotic imagination allows for a richer, more potent sex life.

But if people can simply conjure their fantasy in a perfect simulation, this could dull their erotic imagination in the same way that eating rich food every day renders the appetite inert. Why would the subject bother delving into the erotic mystery of the other — imagine what they might be like in bed or dressed in lingerie — when Open AI can generate a high-resolution simulation of the same thing?

All of this may exacerbate the so-called sex recession: despite — or perhaps because of — being constantly surrounded by hyperreal sexual imagery, people are having far less real-world intercourse. Our newsfeeds — and soon, our AI prompts — deliver ever more abundant sexual content, yet instead of sparking desire, they risk depleting libidinal energy and discouraging actual sexual encounters.

Just as web 2.0 and attention-span-killing news feeds are bringing about a post-literate age, it’s possible to imagine simulated AI porn bringing about a paradoxically post-erotic age.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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