OpenAI shelved plans to release an adult chatbot, Spotify testing a tool to help real artists deal with AI slop, and a jury rules against Meta and YouTube in social media addiction case

**Engadget** (0:07)
OpenAI dropped its plans to release an adult chatbot. Spotify is testing a tool to help real artists deal with AI slop. And a jury ruled against Meta and YouTube in a social media addiction case. It's Thursday, March 26th, and here's a quick look at tech news this morning from Engadget.
OpenAI has indefinitely abandoned its plans to release an erotic chat bot for adults following concerns from employees and investors. The company confirmed that news to The Financial Times earlier this week. Plans for such a feature first announced in October of last year for release in December had already been delayed while the company debated whether to release it at all. It is the second app OpenAI has decided to shelve this week. After announcing on Tuesday that it was shutting down its Sora video generator. So the adult-oriented chatbot, reportedly called Citron Mode, is now on hold with no planned release date. Two people familiar with the matter told The Financial Times that the company reportedly had difficulty training models that previously avoided erotic content and also removing illegal behavior like bestiality or incest. OpenAI said that it wanted to conduct long-term research on the effects of erotic chats and user attachments to AI, adding that there was currently not yet enough empirical evidence on the subject. The company also said it wanted to focus on its core productivity tools like coding assistants and drop side quests like Sora and the erotic chatbot. Now, the idea for adult features came after OpenAI announced that it would add parental controls and automatic age detection features for ChatGPT. CEO Sam Altman said back in October that the company had always been careful about such issues over concerns around unhealthy AI attachments, but felt comfortable that it could safely relax the restrictions in most cases. But the adult mode had reportedly caused concern among investors, particularly amid the controversy caused by rival XAI's Grok model that generated deep fake nudes of real people and children. Staff also worried about the feature, with one senior employee even leaving the company over the issue saying, AI should not replace your friends or your family. You should have human connections. Now, another challenge is OpenAI's age-checking tech introduced following lawsuits from families who said that ChatGPT harmed their children. That age-checking tech reportedly has an error rate higher than 10%, which would still give a large number of young people access to the chatbot. OpenAI said that figure is in the industry standard range and that it is continuing to work on its accuracy. Low-quality, mass-produced AI songs have been flooding music streaming platforms like Spotify for a couple of years now. This is annoying, but relatively easy for fans to avoid. However, it leads to real problems for artists. There's so much AI slop coming in that some gets falsely attributed to actual musicians on these platforms. This messes with brand identity and audience retention, but Spotify is testing a new tool to help real artists exercise more control over their profiles. The platform's Artist Profile Protection feature lets musicians review releases before they go live and become associated with their profiles. Now, this should prevent AI slop from creeping in, as the actual artist will have final say when 100 new songs show up out of the blue that sort of sound like them, but with all of that pesky soul removed. It's in beta right now, and if an artist denies a track, it will not be associated with their profile. It will not contribute to stats, and it will not show up in user recommendations. This looks to be a simple and potentially effective solution to this ongoing problem. This comes just a week after Sony requested the removal of more than 135,000 AI generated songs from Spotify. After it was discovered, the tracks were impersonating real artists. This even happens to bands that have opted out of Spotify entirely. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard left the platform last year to protest CEO Daniel X investment in a weapons manufacturing company, but a deep fake artist quickly filled that vacuum. Now, some of this is not malicious, it's a numbers game for the creators of these tracks. Statistics vary, but it's been estimated that around 50,000 AI generated songs get uploaded to Spotify each and every day. The platform deleted 75 million of these tracks last year, and with this many uploads, it's easy for tracks to accidentally end up on the wrong artist's profile. Bad actors looking to attach their slop to a known quantity compounds that issue. In any event, it is good that Spotify is trying to do something about this. We don't know when the tool will exit the beta phase and become available for all artists on the platform. That day can't come soon enough, though.