Tag Archives: OpenAI

Porn and Ads: How ChatGPT Plans for the Future

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Sam Altman of OpenAI has expressed conflicted feelings about AI erotica (i.e., porn). When asked on a podcast in August 2025 if there were decisions he had made that were “best for the world, but not best for winning,” Altman replied: “We haven’t put a sex bot avatar in ChatGPT yet.” Altman indicated erotica would boost growth and revenue, but said it wouldn’t align with his company’s long-term incentive of serving users. “I’m proud of the company and how little we get distracted by that,” Altman said. “But sometimes we do get tempted.” But later in 2025, Altman posted that “We [OpenAI] “aren’t the elected moral police of the world,” “In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here.”

Excerpt from Sam Schechner et al., OpenAI’s Bid to Allow X-Rated Talk Is Freaking Out Its Own Advisers, WSJ,  Mar. 15, 2026

On March 23, 205, it was announced that OpenAI has hired Meta Platform’s  advertising executive Dave Dugan to lead its global ad sales efforts, marking a further step in the company’s push to build out new revenue streams around its artificial intelligence products. Dugan brings experience working with large global brands at Meta, which generated nearly $200 billion in advertising revenue in 2025. (Yahoo Finance).


The Price of Political Obedience: the Yes Men are not Revolting Yet

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Co-founder Dario Amodei has made safety and social responsibility central to Anthropic’s approach to AI. Usage restrictions governing its contract with the Pentagon stipulate that its AI cannot be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon, which objects to outside limits on what its troops can do, wants unrestricted access for all lawful purposes… If Anthropic was too inflexible, the Pentagon could have simply terminated the contract. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went further, declaring on X that “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” Such declaration, according to commentators, amounted to “corporate murder”, The “message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.”

Excerpt from Greg Ip, Anthropic’s Pentagon Battle Matters to Every Business, WSJ, Mar. 13, 2026

Can AI Do That? Knowledge Impossible to Copy

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Zuckerberg hasn’t had much success in his efforts to hire the field’s biggest stars, including OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever and its chief research officer, Mark Chen. Many candidates are happy to take a meeting at Zuckerberg’s homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. In private, they are comparing gossip and calculating Meta’s chances of winning the AI race.

The handful of researchers who are smartest about AI have built up what one described as “tribal knowledge” that is almost impossible to replicate. Rival researchers have lived in the same group houses in San Francisco, where they discuss papers that might provide clues for achieving the next great breakthrough. 

Excerpt from Ben Coen et al, It’s Known as ‘The List’—and It’s a Secret File of AI Geniuses, WSJ, June 27, 2025

Like a Lamb to the Slaughter: DeepSeek Collects Personal Data–Nobody Cares

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Amid ongoing fears over TikTok, Chinese generative AI platform DeepSeek says it’s sending heaps of US user data straight to its home country, potentially setting the stage for greater scrutiny. The United States’ recent regulatory action against the Chinese-owned social video platform TikTok prompted mass migration to another Chinese app, the social platform “Rednote.” Now, a generative artificial intelligence platform from the Chinese developer DeepSeek is exploding in popularity, posing a potential threat to US AI dominance and offering the latest evidence that moratoriums like the TikTok ban will not stop Americans from using Chinese-owned digital services…In many ways, DeepSeek is likely sending more data back to China than TikTok has in recent years, since the social media company moved to US cloud hosting to try to deflect US security concerns “It shouldn’t take a panic over Chinese AI to remind people that most companies set the terms for how they use your private data” says John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “And that when you use their services, you’re doing work for them, not the other way around.”To be clear, DeepSeek is sending your data to China. The English-language DeepSeek privacy policy, which lays out how the company handles user data, is unequivocal: “We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

In other words, all the conversations and questions you send to DeepSeek, along with the answers that it generates, are being sent to China or can be. DeepSeek’s privacy policies also outline the information it collects about you, which falls into three sweeping categories: information that you share with DeepSeek, information that it automatically collects, and information that it can get from other source…DeepSeek is largely free… “So what do we pay with? What… do we usually pay with: data, knowledge, content, information.” …

As with all digital platforms—from websites to apps—there can also be a large amount of data that is collected automatically and silently when you use the services. DeepSeek says it will collect information about what device you are using, your operating system, IP address, and information such as crash reports. It can also record your “keystroke patterns or rhythm.”…

Excerpts from John Scott-Railton, DeepSeek’s Popular AI App Is Explicitly Sending US Data to China, Wired, Jan. 27, 2025