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“You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere; Imagination, life is your creation.” The lyrics of ‘Barbie Girl’, that monstrous dance hit from the nineties (which got a second shot at virality in recent years when the Barbie movie came out), may just not be a sexed-up version of a childhood play fantasy, but very much symbolic of the turn adult entertainment itself is taking in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).

This weekend, OpenAI founder & CEO Sam Altman announced that its category-defining generative AI tool ChatGPT will “roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle (and) will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”

“We are making a decision to prioritise safety over privacy and freedom for teenagers (nor are we) loosening any policies to mental health,” Altman later clarified, adding, “We also care very much about the principles of treating adult users like adults. As AI becomes more important in people’s lives, allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission.”

Restrictions or censorship?

In a way, Altman’s move is also a business decision forced in good measure by two developments: One was his company’s own latest update GPT 4o, which could generate not just textual responses, but audio, video and text within a single neural framework, thereby increasing its versatility and making interactions appear that much more human-like—users weren’t too happy by the caps OpenAI put on its usage especially for base tiers and the ‘restrictions’ (read: censorship) that was in place.

And secondly, while ChatGPT remained demure and placed restrictions on the tasks the tool could do, there were an entire bunch of lesser-known rivals out there working on a laissez-faire model, and getting popular. For example, Elon Musk’s X-based AI bot ‘Grok’ gained popularity for its sassy, sardonic, and sometimes profane avatar.

Not to forget the frantic progress being made by the likes of China’s DeepSeek trying to upend ChatGPT’s throne, or search engine king Google’s desperate attempt to regain pole position with its own ‘Gemini’ AI tool – it was clear that OpenAI could not rest on its ‘path-breaker’ laurel any longer.

ChatGPT’s relaxation of age restrictions to allow ‘erotica’ would come into effect only from the year-end holiday season, with strict verification of users—this has more to do with the storm that internet content companies, particularly social media platforms, have been facing from the public for their addictive nature and impact on mental health, especially amongst teenagers.

But there is a bigger issue, and that is how it will impact the very world of adult entertainment. From cave paintings to the Renaissance, erotica has been equally exalted and derided depending on the eyes of the beholder —some call it an art form while others dismiss it as a bawdy form of vicarious pleasure down the ages.

Recent studies of internet porn have even pointed fingers at its adverse impact on real-world connections due to the improbable standards and expectations viewing it long-term creates, and even debilitating sexual relationships in the long run. Behavioural experts also bill porn as a stress-buster and a needed ‘release’ in today’s stressed-out modern life.

For all the heckles it raises, erotica has only grown from strength to strength over the ages—while the Renaissance awakening raised nudity to the level of fine art, the printing press ensured across-the-board availability, as erotica descended from its noble perch (till then enjoyed only by feudal classes) and went mainstream. The advent of publications, first and then films and TV in the twentieth century, gave a fillip to mass consumption of the art form, even while governments tried, without much success, to nip the hedonism in the bud.

With the VCR in the 1980s, followed by the opening of the floodgates with the internet in the late nineties, there was no looking back. As the smartphone and cheap data combined took hold in the 2010s, adult entertainment was virtually available for everyone at the touch of a button, if they wanted it. The pandemic made the grip of the virtual world on adult entertainment that much more central, as even strip bars and brothels shut down across the western world, the likes of OnlyFans, where anyone can make money through varying degrees of adult entertainment, gained currency.

But it will be a leap across another dimension with AI, as initial experiments make it all too glaring. Fantasy may be a matter of personal choice and liberty, but what happens when consensus is not inbuilt into it? Is it still harmless if someone somewhere in the privacy is ‘creating’ an AI sex doll version of you?

The criminal angle

The adult entertainment industry’s basic plank of consensual voyeurism will be the first hit with AI, and it is still anybody’s guess how this will pan out. Criminal incidents like an Assamese girl whose face was morphed into an Instagram sensation called ‘Babydoll Archi’ couple of months ago without her knowledge by a jealous ex-boyfriend (while morphing was always a sneaky crime, it achieves real-world authenticity with AI tools), or the global scandal when pop star Taylor Swift’s AI-generated nude pics were circulated over social media early last year were just unsettling early warning signs.

The ease with which an AI tool can create sexual imagery for you will have deeper repercussions which policymakers and sociologists are still to make full sense of. While ChatGPT might have inbuilt safeguards—a request for an explicit image of a particular person after providing their likeness from existing online resources like social media handles, be it a celebrity or your neighbourhood housewife, may be declined by it, there is no clarity on what the threshold will be when it comes to competing services. It is in this context that the cases filed by a string of Indian film personalities led by Aishwarya Rai and Karan Johar asking for protection of their personality rights, including the use of their name, image and likeness, acquire added significance.