For a brief, fleeting moment, one of the biggest names in AI thought they were going to revolutionize the industry with a new, wholly original idea: pornography. Well, erotica, or whatever cleaned-up PR word you want to use to describe AI-generated sex content.

You may remember the not-too-distant past when OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced it would release an erotic chatbot for adults. That plan is now being “indefinitely” delayed, according to a report from the Financial Times.

The delay is allegedly the result of months of internal infighting and external pressure over whether AI should be turned into a digitized girlfriend for lonely men. Several people within OpenAI, including its well-being advisory council, were allegedly concerned that its users would form emotional and even sexual attachments to machines.

That is, of course, not a hypothetical concern. I have extensively covered the severity of the attachment some chatbot users develop to these AI services, and the dangerous delusions they can spark in people’s minds that can end tragically. Making an erotic version of an already psychologically and emotionally manipulative AI chatbot had the potential to be disastrous.

And then there is the obvious problem of children getting hold of it. OpenAI’s age-verification tech isn’t very good, so minors would absolutely have slipped through the cracks.

All of this unfolded as OpenAI shuttered its generative video application Sora, thereby severing ties with the Disney Corporation, which had recently signed a deal allowing Disney fans to use Sora to create AI-generated videos featuring Disney-owned characters. The severing of that deal and the shuttering of Sora were, apparently, a surprise to Disney, according to Reuters.