Day: November 4, 2025

The linchpin of America’s economy wants you to use it for porn

The big economic headlines about OpenAI are unlike any in history, and so is the company’s performance: Sam Altman’s behemoth is eyeing a monster IPO at up to a trillion-dollar valuation, off the strength of the unprecedented circular money pump it has built with Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, and AMD, the tech firms at the core of America’s all-in strategic bid for global AI dominance.

The abstruse details can make OpenAI seem to ordinary Americans like one of several titans forging our destiny in the sky. But down here on ground level, the main touchpoint in our everyday lives — ChatGPT, on track for a billion users by year’s end — is being rebuilt to extract value from billions more in the lowest of ways: pornography. In December, OpenAI will branch into erotica, allowing adults to generate sexual content through ChatGPT.

We don’t need another sermon on smut. Everyone knows what porn does to a mind, a marriage, and a man. But what does this shift mean for a company that once vowed to benefit “all of humanity”? It began with talk of productivity and progress. Now it’s about pleasure on demand. The future of work has become the future of want — degraded, automated, and alienated from true human connection.

Mass automation and mass lobotomization are two sides of the same silicon coin.

It’s easy to call it moral decline, but it’s really market design. When automation stops astonishing, appetite becomes the next asset. When machines can’t wow us with intellect, they woo us with instinct. The shift from algorithms that think to algorithms that tease goes from detour to destination. A company built to conquer productive labor, it seems, must pivot to fruitless longing.

OpenAI’s machines mastered our spreadsheets more quickly than any normal person anticipated. But the real acceleration is now aimed straight into our subconscious. The same technology that writes code can now whisper sweet nothings — or worse, learn exactly which nothings you’ll pay to hear. That debilitating kink you never knew you had is ready to become your life. Every click a confession, every prompt a prayer, the machine rapt with the attention of a priest and the greed of a pimp.

For all the talk of progress, automation has mainly made life easier for corporations than for citizens. Big business can’t really optimize for your liberation. Its ideal is lubrication: systems so smooth that people stop noticing they’re the raw material. Machines handle the manufacturing while humans are trained to consume, scroll, sigh, and occasionally remember to shower.

The human brain, once a tool of invention, is now a target for invasion. Mass automation and mass lobotomization are two sides of the same silicon coin. The first replaces our labor; the second replaces our longing. The rise of the robots is a perfect excuse for the humans to retreat — first from work, then from will, and finally from wonder. When every craving can be coded, curiosity becomes a casualty.

RELATED: FINALLY: Here’s how to stop smartphone spam calls

Photo by Bloomberg/Getty Images

In doubt? Look around. Men who once built bridges now build playlists. Women who once raised children now raise engagement metrics. The world hums with productivity, yet feels profoundly empty. This is what happens when an economy stops serving people and starts sculpting them.

AI was supposed to free humanity from drudgery. Instead, it’s freeing humanity from … humanity. OpenAI’s move into digital desire is only the latest proof. What began as an effort to improve efficiency has morphed into an enterprise to perfect escape. A machine that can mimic love makes us forget what humanity feels like. And once that happens, we’re ready to surrender our very existence to the machines.

Of course, the pitch will sound noble: connection, expression, inclusivity, all the buzzwords that sell bondage as belonging. The same pitches that sold social media will sell the new and “improved” synthetic intimacy. Beneath this sweet talk sits a steel trap. If you can automate labor, you can monetize loneliness. If you can predict consumption, you can prescribe desire. The human heart, the real core of who we are, becomes just another input field, our smut of choice the last echo of our identity.

How long can it last? In this brave new marketplace, pleasure is both a product and a punishment. It numbs the pain it creates.

Sure, it’s tempting to laugh it off — what’s a little digital flirtation among consenting adults? But this isn’t really about sex. It’s about surrendering real, embodied intimacy for a shadow. The more we hand our inner lives to machines, the less we remember how to live without them.

A new AI economy built on reducing us all to skin suits will not build monuments or miracles, but mirrors — endless, glowing screens that feed our urges until we forget what restraint ever was. It’s extinction by pacification: the calm convergence of technology and tranquilization.

Ten years from now, the American workforce may be remembered, not relied upon. Its labor automated, its pride outsourced, its purpose repackaged as “upskilling.” Politicians will preach “resilience,” corporations will promise “retraining,” and millions will sit through their days bone-idle, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. They’ll be told the future is full of “opportunity,” yet find themselves waiting for a purpose that never arrives. I might be wrong — I hope I am — but every sign points one way: toward a nation drifting into digital dependency, where the only thing still working is one big machine.

In his prophetic book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman warned that societies don’t collapse under tyranny but triviality. AI offers malevolent opportunists the chance to make that death spiral a business model. It can memorize your wants, mimic your worries, and leverage them all in a blink. OpenAI’s porn pivot is the hook, line, and sinker of this new economy of control: desire the lure, data the hook, the soul the catch. As Adam and Eve remind us, what begins as curiosity ends in captivity.

And this is why all Americans should care, whether or not they understand AI. Because AI doesn’t need permission to know you. It already does — your habits, your hungers, your hesitations. And in the hands of power, that knowledge becomes possession.