Microsoft AI chief says company won’t develop chatbots for erotica – The American Bazaar
Microsoft AI Chief Mustafa Suleyman said the company will not be building artificial intelligence services that provide “simulated erotica.” “That’s just not a service we’re going to provide,” Suleyman said on Thursday at the Paley International Council Summit in Menlo Park, California.
“Other companies will build that.”
This comes a week after Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — a longtime partner of Microsoft — announced that the company will soon relax some of its safety restrictions allowing users to make ChatGPT’s responses friendlier or more “human-like,” and for “verified adults” to engage in erotic conversations.
READ: Sam Altman announces new ‘adult’ version of ChatGPT (
“We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right,” Altman had said. “In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”
Microsoft has for years been a major investor and cloud partner to OpenAI, however, there have been tensions between them of late. OpenAI is now partnering with Microsoft rivals like Google
and Oracle, and Microsoft has been focusing more on its own AI services.
Earlier on Thursday, Microsoft announced a series of new features for its Copilot AI chatbot, including an AI companion called Mico that can respond to users through a call feature and express itself by changing its color.
READ: Musk’s Grok AI may violate App Store rules over inappropriate content in 12+ app (
In August, Suleyman had written an essay titled, “We must build AI for people; not to be a person.” He argued that tech companies should not build “seemingly conscious” services that can give humans the impression that they may be capable of suffering, and wrote that conscious AIs could create another “axis of division” for humanity.
On Thursday, Suleyman said the creation of seemingly conscious AI is already happening, primarily with erotica-focused services. He referenced Altman’s comments, as well as Elon Musk’s Grok, which launched an adult chatbot in July, saying “You can already see it with some of these avatars and people leaning into the kind of sexbot erotica direction,” Suleyman said.
“This is very dangerous, and I think we should be making conscious decisions to avoid those kinds of things.” xAI, the company behind Grok, responded by saying, “Legacy Media Lies.”
Nileena Sunil is a Reporter for the American Bazaar. A postgraduate in English Literature from Christ University, Bengaluru, she has previously worked as an instructional designer and a copywriter before switching fields.
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