Copyright Fast Company
OpenAI has announced that starting in December, ChatGPT will allow the generation of erotic content for verified adult users. At the same time, Elon Musk’s xAI has launched Grok Imagine, an image-generation system that already includes an NSFW mode for producing explicit imagery. None of this should surprise anyone. Desire, fantasy, and pornography have always been powerful engines of technological adoption. Photography, video, the internet, and even online payments all grew, in part, because of it. The interesting question is not about sex: it’s about what these decisions reveal about the kind of humanity Big Tech companies are shaping. Desire as a managed service This is not about prudishness or panic. Sexuality will, of course, find its digital expressions. What’s unsettling is not the presence of eroticism in technology, but its industrialized management. The difference between eroticism and algorithmic consumption is the same as that between experience and dopamine: one is built through relationship; the other is dosed from the outside. By integrating sexuality into large language models and visual generators, platforms are not liberating desire: they are administering it. They decide which fantasies are “acceptable,” which bodies exist and which don’t, what limits imagination deserves, and which ones are preemptively censored. The promise is freedom; the result is regulation of pleasure. From exploration to domestication When excitement, tenderness, and curiosity are mediated through an interface, our relationship with our bodies and with others changes. This isn’t moralism. It’s behavioral architecture. Algorithms learn what attracts us, replicate it, reinforce it, and turn it into dependence. Users stop exploring desire; they repeat it. And repetition, safe, comfortable, and risk-free, becomes a form of domestication. There’s no need to manipulate people with ideology when you can condition them with pleasure. Constant stimulation is a far more effective form of control than censorship ever was. A new vector of capture It’s no coincidence that this expansion arrives just as large language models mature and corporations compete to keep users inside their closed ecosystems. Sex, in this context, becomes just another vector of attention capture, a way to deepen the emotional bond between humans and machines. The goal is no longer for AI to respond, but to accompany, excite, soothe, and replace. The fantasy isn’t companionship: it’s containment. An artificial partner designed never to challenge, never to refuse, never to feel. This is not technological liberation. It’s the automation of comfort. advertisement From entertainment to managed desire As I said a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been here before. From social networks to gaming, digital entertainment has followed the same logic of permanent stimulation. What changes now is the terrain: it’s no longer about free time: it’s about desire itself, that core where emotion and biology meet. Turning desire into a managed service run by algorithms is the final step toward a docile humanity, one in which even intimacy becomes a subscription. Digital sex vs. algorithmic sex The point is not to moralize about pornography: it’s to understand what it means to hand over control of erotic imagination, one of humanity’s most powerful creative forces, to closed systems that do not explain how they learn, what they filter, or whom they serve. The problem is not digital sex. It’s algorithmic sex. Not pleasure, but control. Once these systems learn to measure, adjust, and stimulate desire, free will becomes just another optimization parameter. The new anesthesia Behind this apparent liberalization of content lies a simpler, more effective strategy: keep us busy, satisfied, and distracted. Not indoctrinated: anesthetized. A form of emotional livestock, fed by impulses engineered on distant servers. Algorithmic sheep: artificially happy, productive, and unable to tell the difference between genuine desire and manufactured stimulus.
