When ChatGPT first hit the scene, it was heralded as the latest in a long line of technologies that Silicon Valley investors told us was going to fundamentally alter every facet of human existence. Fast forward to today, where a Washington Post analysis of nearly 200,000 English-language conversations with AI chatbots reveals that the vast majority of users aren’t using AI to change the world.
They’re using it to do homework and get off.
Videos by VICE
The most common use case was creative writing: Around 20% of requests for generating fan fiction, poems, and scripts. Homework help was in second place, at 18%. Overall, a very horny 7% of conversations were attempts to make chatbots churn out sexual content. Of course, people use chatbots for more mundane stuff like writing cover letters for a job application, too. But as soon as we’re done with all that tedious work, it’s right back to sex.
You can actually search the dataset the researchers used, which was created by the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI. To test just how horny things could get, I plugged in the word “vulva” to see what it would spit out. Hundreds of interactions popped up. Some were funny. Some were so disturbing that I felt like it was an FBI sting operation. There’s one that begins as a series of comparisons of human genitals to parts of a plant (testicles are seeds) that turns into physical descriptions of characters from the Spider-Man Spider-Verse that somehow evolves into a vivid description of vaginas. It’s a wild ride.
It seems that while many AI models are being built with the intent of assisting with higher-end functions, we just keep asking them to do stuff they weren’t designed to do. In covering the topic, NY Mag flagged a recent academic paper titled “Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons.” That study describes how AI companies are running out of stuff to steal to train their AI models—which is funny, since the things they’re stealing aren’t especially suited to writing erotic fiction.
Will we ever truly find a better use for this technology and our day-to-day lives? Will AI models be trained with better datasets in the future that expand their capabilities so they can help us do other things other than write porn—or do they just need to focus on writing porn better? It’s tough to say right now, but I’d bet on more porn.
