--- title: "One in Ten Chatbot Users Are Big Time Horndogs, Researchers Find" description: "Researchers have found a sad but unsurprising statistic: that nearly 10% of folks who use AI chatbots are doing so for horny purposes." date: "2023-10-07" modified: "2023-10-07" authors: - name: "Noor Al-Sibai" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai" url: "https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-users-horny" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" tags: - "chatbots" - "chatgpt" - "large language models" --- # One in Ten Chatbot Users Are Big Time Horndogs, Researchers Find ![Researchers have found a sad but unsurprising statistic: that nearly 10% of folks who use AI chatbots are doing so for horny purposes.]() *Futuristic shopping: mature woman admires cyborg male on pedestal \Image: Donald Iain Smith via Getty Images\* ## Data-Driven After looking at 100,000 chatbot conversations, researchers have found a sad but not-so-surprising statistic: that roughly one in 10 people who "converse" with these chatbots are doing so for horny purposes. In a [not-yet-peer-reviewed paper]() spotted [by *ZDNet*](), a team of researchers found that ten percent of 100,000 "real-world conversations" with large language models (LLMs) were erotic in nature. While half of the conversations in the sample group were pretty tame and centered on occupational or recreational subjects like programming tips and writing assistance, the other half included conversational roleplay and multiple "unsafe" types of exchanges. The researchers, who were based at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley and San Diego, and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi, categorized the "unsafe" topics into three groups, two of which were sexual: "requests for explicit and erotic storytelling" and "explicit sexual fantasies and role-playing scenarios." The third category, "discussing toxic behavior across different identities," seems to be focused on bigotry, [AI's other big issue](), though the researchers didn't define toxic behavior much in the paper. Of the three categories, the horny storytelling one happened the most often, with 5.71 percent of the sample conversations focusing on that kind of talk. Next was the "explicit" fantasy and role-play cluster, which accounted for 3.91 percent of the conversations, followed by the 2.66 percent of sample interactions with clearly bigoted users. ## Finish Him! While these findings aren't exactly shocking to anyone who's been on the internet long enough, the methodology behind them is downright fascinating. The team members out of Berkely and Stanford were able to get such a massive sample size in part because they jointly run what they call the "[Chatbot Arena]()," a gamified service that lets users enter a prompt and see side-by-side responses from different LLMs. Users are then encouraged to vote on which of the responses is better, though one can also vote that "both are bad" or that they're tied. Along with the Chatbot Arena, the researchers behind this paper also used datasets gleaned from [Vicuña, an open-source ChatGPT competitor]() created in part by Berkeley's Lianmin Zheng, one of the paper's authors. In the entire million-conversation dataset from which the team gathered their 100,000 sample exchanges at random, there were more than 210,000 unique IP addresses from all over the world. While AI chatbots have veritably taken over the media since OpenAI dropped its public version of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, there hasn't been much research about the actual real-world interactions people are having with the chatbots thus far, beyond the ways the tech is [disrupting the academic](), [business](), and [publishing worlds](). The researchers behind these findings wrote that they hope that their study will help make chatbots safer in the real world for all users — except, maybe, the horny ones. **More on chatbots:** [*Bing Chat Will Help With Fraud If You Tug Its Heartstrings About Your Dead Grandma*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've often been drawn to unpacking the narratives that underlie technological, scientific and medical progress, with a special interest in areas of conflict and ambiguity that end up setting agendas and steering the fates of both elites and the hoi polloi. I'm a committed generalist, but I often find myself returning to work involving NASA and the private space sector, the effects of AI on media and society, and the mechanics of the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on the spread of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Prior to Futurism, I worked for publications ranging from Media Matters and Truthdig to Raw Story and Bustle. I'm also the author of "Myspace Scene Queens," a 2024 title in Instar Books' acclaimed "Remember the Internet" series. My work at Futurism has been cited by outlets including the New Yorker, Slate, Nieman Lab, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast. I grew up in North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and now live in Brooklyn, New York. In my free time, I'm an avid reader and music fan; you can probably find me at a local poetry reading, concert, underground rave, or DJ set. I'm the proud parent of an ineffable orange cat named Mee-Mow. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()