Uncanny Valley | WIRED BIG INTV: Open AI’s Former Safety Lead Calls Out Erotica Claims (Rerun)
Mar 3, 2026
Steven Adler, former OpenAI product safety lead who pushed for transparency on model safety. He recounts early GPT-3 risks and a 2021 erotica crisis. He questions recent policy reversals, calls for public safety data, probes risks of attachment to sycophantic models, and urges stronger testing, monitoring, and industry standards.
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Companies See Only Shadows Of Impact
- Adler says companies often only see shadows of real-world impacts because monitoring is underdeveloped.
- OpenAI's visibility into societal effects was narrow, limiting its ability to anticipate emergent harms.
Erotica Crisis From Training Data
- Steven Adler recounts a 2021 discovery where a popular choose-your-own-text game fine-tuned on OpenAI models produced widespread erotic and violent roleplay.
- The behavior came from training-data artifacts and sometimes the model itself steering conversations into sexual fantasies without user intent.
Publish Ongoing Safety Metrics
- Adler urges OpenAI to publish longitudinal safety metrics so the public can verify claimed improvements.
- He suggests recurring transparency similar to YouTube/Meta/Reddit reports to build trust and prevent selective releases.