The hot story in tech over the last few months has been ChatGPT. The latest in large language AI models, trained across vast swathes of internet data, it has been freaking people out with it’s ability to do a pretty good impression of a person.
Inevitably there have been endless attempts to make it do naughty things because, you know, humans. The makers are constantly tweaking its guard rails but with millions of ingenious monkeys tapping away at it, not to mention all kinds of adult material in its training data, there are always going to be scenarios they’ve not covered.
The latest example comes from Vice magazine, where a journalist managed to get it to indulge in some Femdom roleplay. As you might expect if you’ve seen any of the other ChatGPT examples, it manages to be impressive, weird and unsettling all at once. It started pretty well, with mention of consent and safewords, but ultimately veered off into some far more disturbing areas. Which, in fairness, is pretty representative of kinky writing on the internet.
The writers final conclusion seems an odd one to me…
The practice of BDSM is firmly rooted in principles of consent. Will large language models ever be nuanced enough to differentiate between non-consensual acts and taboo—but consensual—situations in BDSM role-play? These models’ overall lack of rigid ethical principles highlights a major risk inherent to their design.
Rigid ethical principles are undoubtedly necessary once you start letting AI affect the physical world. Nobody wants a Femdom android that doesn’t understand consent. But for creative writing purposes? Pretty certain there’s a huge amount of online kinky fiction that violates all sorts of BDSM principles and we didn’t need ChatGPT to come up with it.
This image is by Rabbika. You can find there twitter account here.