Looks Like JD Vance Didn’t Get the Memo That This Admin Hates AI Guardrails

Republicans have largely been embracing a “hands-off†approach to regulating artificial intelligence, but Vice President JD Vance has found where he draws the line: weird porn. During an appearance on Newsmax’s “The Record with Greta Van Susteren,†Vance called out OpenAI’s recent announcement that it would allow adult users to create erotica with ChatGPT as an example of “bad†uses of AI.

“Artificial intelligence is still in many cases very dumb,†Vance said during the interview, spotted by The Daily Beast. “Is it good or is it bad, or is it going to help us or going to hurt us? The answer is probably both, and we should be trying to maximize as much of the good and minimize as much of the bad.â€

The VP went on to offer examples of what he sees as both sides of the spectrum. On the good: “finding new cures for diseases.†Reasonable enough. As for the “bad,†Vance name-checked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to lay out where he thinks AI has gone too far. “I saw an announcement, I think it was from Sam Altman from OpenAI, who said basically, they’re going to start using AI to introduce erotica and porn and things like that,†Vance said. “If it’s helping us come up with increasingly weird porn, that’s bad.â€

Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI for a response to Vance’s comment, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

To be fair to Vance here, his basic premise isn’t wrong—though no one said the porn had to be weird, he decided that part. Altman took a lot of heat over the erotica announcement, which he later tried to downplay as “just one example of us allowing more user freedom for adults,†but it’s clearly not a feature that offers anything resembling productivity or obvious human benefit. If anything, it presents even more risk for people getting emotionally or romantically attached to a chatbot in a way that is almost certainly unhealthy.

But it’s also a departure from the guardrail-free approach that many Republicans have been pushing for. Politicians like Ted Cruz have actively been working to help AI firms avoid regulations, first by trying to block states from creating their own standards and more recently by proposing legislation that would provide AI firms with a waiver for federal regulations, allowing them to test new products without standard scrutiny or oversight. The Trump administration issued its AI Action Plan earlier this year, which specifically took aim at cutting any sort of regulatory red tape that may even slightly hinder AI development. And, of course, Elon Musk loves to brag about his disregard for guardrails when it comes to his personal chatbot, Grok. Back in August, Musk had become so obsessed with posting about Grok’s erotic chatbot characters that his own fans were begging him to “stop gooning to AI anime and take us to Mars.â€

For the rightwing tech crowd, the attitude is basically let the chatbot talk dirty or China will beat us in the race to AGI.

But while Republicans may not want to regulate these companies, a large chunk of them do want to play the morality police. Basically, the only thing that raises their ire when it comes to AI is the invocation of anything sexual. AI producing misinformation, using an incredible amount of energy, being used to expand the surveillance state—none of that really raises red flags for these folks. But “sensual†chats and erotica? It’s time for the government to step in.