When ChatGPT first launched, it was hailed as the latest in a long line of technologies that Silicon Valley investors told us would fundamentally change every aspect of human existence. Today, a Washington Post analysis of nearly 200,000 English-language conversations with AI chatbots shows that the vast majority of users aren’t using AI to change the world.
They use it to do their homework and to take off.
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The most common use case was creative writing: around 20% of requests were for the creation of fanfiction, poetry and screenplays. Homework help came in second at 18%. Overall, a very horny 7% of conversations were about attempts to get chatbots to produce sexual content. Of course, people also use chatbots for more mundane things like writing cover letters for job applications. But once we’re done with all that tedious work, it’s right back to sex.
You can actually search the dataset the researchers used, created by the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI. To test how horny it can get, I typed in the word “vulva” to see what it spits out. Hundreds of interactions popped up. Some were funny. Some were so disturbing I felt like it was an FBI operation. One of them starts with a series of comparisons of human genitalia to plant parts (testicles are seeds) that turn into physical descriptions of characters from the Spider-Man Spider-Verse, which somehow evolve into a vivid description of vaginas. It’s a wild ride.
It seems that while many AI models are developed with the intention of helping with higher-level functions, we’re constantly asking them to do things they weren’t designed to do. NY Mag pointed to a recent academic paper on this topic called “Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons.” This study describes how AI companies are slowly running out of material they can steal to train their AI models – which is funny, since the things they’re stealing aren’t particularly good for writing erotic stories.
Will we ever really find a better use for this technology and our daily lives? Will AI models in the future be trained with better data sets that expand their capabilities so they can help us with things other than writing porn – or will they just need to focus on writing better porn? It’s hard to say right now, but I’d bet on more porn.
