The pornification of human attention

Sam Altman's disingenuous announcement, OnlyFans economics, the extremification feedback loop, and why AI was always going to enter the arousal business.

Two weeks ago, Sam Altman announced that sex may be coming to ChatGPT with the special disingenuousness reserved for billionaire owners of tech companies. “As part of our ‘treat adult users like adults‘ principle,“ he explained, “we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.” Even the universe’s most gullible beings (baby moths, newsroom managers who greenlight custom CMS builds) would pause and think, “Wait, this guy’s not telling us everything.” As if this were simply about respecting user autonomy rather than opening an entirely new monetization frontier.

I can think of a dozen ways this becomes corrosive, leading to the collapse of whatever already-tenuous boundaries exist between synthetic and real intimacy, exacerbating the loneliness epidemic. It can have consequences so bleak, I’m still not entirely convinced they’ll actually follow through (Who is the baby moth now?). But someone will. Someone already has. And moralizing about it won’t change the fundamental economics at work.

The attention economy has always gravitated toward sexuality, not out of collective perversity, but because sex is the purest state of engagement: the rare instant when attention stops scattering and becomes absolute.

Every major information technology in human history has been rapidly adapted for sexual purposes, usually within years, sometimes months, of its introduction. It’s a pattern so consistent it might as well be a law: whenever a new way to transmit information emerges, market forces immediately test what can be monetized through it. And since human attention and money converge most reliably around sex, every new medium inevitably becomes pornified. This isn’t moral failure; it’s economic inevitability.

Content is worthless. Connection is valuable.