Low stakes is where AI thrives

News graphic on OpenAI’s adult-content plans.

It’s an obvious strategy for OpenAI to get into porn.

Wait, what? Wasn’t Sam Altman talking about curing cancer?

As I’ve said before, current Large Language Models thrive in low-stakes environments.

They shine where mistakes don’t matter — where “80% good enough” is good enough.

That’s why almost all the early wins are in media: images, videos, music, writing.
If a movie scene is rubbish, nobody dies. Most of what’s made is rubbish anyway — watch the 100 films out right now and tell me how many are great.

Erotica’s no different. No one storms out because the plot has holes (so to speak). If it’s bad, you just regenerate. Low stakes. Infinite retries.

The potential of AI is enormous — curing cancer, solving ageing, world peace — I believe all of that, and believe we will get there.

But not yet. And most people claiming to be there now are either misunderstanding the path ahead or mis-selling fast track tickets.

Plus there’s no need to oversell it - if understood and used in the right way, we have powerful technology already to achieve a lot of what we thought was sci-fi just a few years ago.

Maybe it’s a good thing we aren’t there yet though. Society needs help to get literate about technology and ourselves, so we can be ready to handle what’s coming when the stakes stop being low.