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Chris Poblete
When we outsource intimacy to machines, we become what we practice. And we’re practicing the wrong things.
This December, OpenAI’s ChatGPT will roll out an overhaul with access to “erotica for verified adults.”
The backlash to Sam Altman’s October announcement on X was swift. Billionaire investor Mark Cuban warned the move would likely backfire, predicting that parents would abandon the platform rather than trust OpenAI’s age-gating verification. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media) called on OpenAI to reverse its decision, citing the “real mental health harms from synthetic intimacy.” California assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan accused the company of choosing profits over the lives of children.
Altman claims this move is an attempt to loosen the restrictions that made ChatGPT less enjoyable for users. He insists the company is simply trying to honor their principle to “treat adult users like adults.”
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Altman’s critics are right to worry. Yet the debate that immediately erupted on X has stayed technical, focusing on the failures of guardrails like age gates and parental controls. In Altman’s erotica clause, if you have age verification plus consent and choice, then you’re an adult and you do what you want. But that’s not adulthood—that’s adolescence with a credit card.
Mike Cosper, Clarissa Moll, Russell Moore
No one seems to be asking the larger question: What does it mean to treat adults like adults?
Technology alone can’t answer this question. We need wisdom. Rather than see adulthood as simply reaching a particular age, the apostle Paul describes adulthood in 1 Corinthians through the language of mature love: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me” (13:11). For Paul, it’s self-sacrificing love—not unconstrained liberty—that marks maturity.
Adulthood isn’t about reaching a certain age and gaining the freedom to live for yourself. Adulthood requires turning outward: learning to love others by dying to self and taking responsibility for both yourself and others.
It’s hard to grow into an adulthood marked by self-sacrifice for the sake of others, though, when our devices form us away from these virtues. Today, millions are already connecting with AI chatbots in what Russell Moore calls “the illusion of relationship and sexuality without covenant, without genuine reality at all.” Character.AI reports that users spend an average of two hours daily with their AI chatbots.
Young people are especially hooked. The company just recently moved to ban teenage users after reports of emotional harm and dependency. Common Sense Media found similar patterns: Young users turn to chatbots for comfort or romantic connection only to wind up more isolated. With these so-called companions, users reach for self-satisfaction without self-sacrifice.
Pornography has always promised satisfaction without work or commitment. Pornography, too, has always been an early tech adopter—helping VHS beat Betamax and testing the limits of broadband long before Netflix and Hulu showed up. And although only approximately 4 percent of websites are pornographic, searches for online porn account for 13 percent of all web traffic and nearly 20 percent of mobile searches. In a US sample, around 11 percent of men and three percent of women self-reported addicted to pornography.”
Porn didn’t just follow the technology. It refined it. It taught us how to buy and sell the desires of the flesh. And the AI revolution doesn’t appear to be any different.
We can’t wait for OpenAI to become moral. But we can decide what kind of adults we’re going to be.
We can’t exercise adult responsibility if we’re not formed into people capable of it. Theologian Thaddeus Williams captures this dynamic: “We become the most like whatever we most love. Our objects of veneration have a way of defining the scope and contours of our soul’s formation (or de-formation).” Our daily habits bend our loves in one direction or another. And habits of synthetic intimacy—micro-doses of pleasure without presence—are shaping us into worshipers of self.
Mandy Smith
Russell Moore
Philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek takes the idea of formation further. Real knowing, she argues, requires real presence. It involves our whole selves—mind, body, will, emotion. The formative habits of AI erotica don’t simply warp our desires but also how we understand the world. It teaches us to treat others as simulations and ourselves as gods.
This impulse isn’t new, of course. The early Gnostics wanted a faith without flesh. They treated the body as a burden to transcend instead of as a gift to be redeemed. You can see the same instincts at work in the age of AI, where connection is offered without the cost of embodied relationship. It’s the illusion of communion without the call to self-denial. But sacrifice and friction are required for growth into mature adulthood.
When we’re presented with sinful options, the maturing Christian response is clear: Choose what’s real. Choose embodied presence, not digital simulation. After all, the Christian story is concrete. To save us, the Word became flesh. The Incarnation insists that love can’t stay abstract. It must be embodied.
Jesus didn’t simulate presence. He listened, forgave, broke bread, washed feet, bore burdens, suffered scars. Jesus, too, embodies a mature adulthood—not one of simulation and age verification but of walking in the way of wisdom and self-control. As just one example, when the Devil offered him shortcuts to glory, Jesus refused, choosing instead to trust his Father (Matt. 4:1–11). In the wilderness, he showed that denying yourself isn’t a type of self-rejection: It’s freedom from the lie that life can be found apart from the goodness of God.
This is the pattern Jesus shows us: Refuse the easy path because there is a true one that leads to life. Real freedom—and adulthood—is found not in mindlessly satisfying our whims but in being freed from the lie that these desires can be satisfied by lesser loves.
C. S. Lewis understood this. In The Great Divorce, the damned don’t choose hell. They shuffle there, step by step, one small compromise at a time. They become ghosts, gradually hollowed out by preferring shadows until they no longer have a taste for real substance.
That’s the real danger—not the sudden corruption of the soul but a gradual habituation that turns us into ghouls.
Altman will sell us the shadowlands and call it adult freedom. But if algorithms have shaped our desires, worship can reshape them. Jesus paid the price to purchase our freedom—not freedom to indulge our desires but freedom from sin and to have our desires transformed so they lead to an abundant life (John 10:10).
Adulthood always requires more than a checkbox. It demands wisdom.
Chris Poblete is a writer, editor, and communications consultant for churches and nonprofits. He previously pastored a church plant in South Orange County, California, and served as editorial director for CT Pastors at Christianity Today. He is the author of The Two Fears.
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