AI companions like Replika are designed to engage in intimate exchanges, but people use general-purpose chatbots for sex talk too, despite their stricter content moderation policies. Now new research shows that not all chatbots are equally willing to talk dirty: DeepSeek is the easiest to convince. But other AI chatbots can be enticed too, if the user persists enough.
Huiqian Lai, a PhD student at Syracuse University, found vast differences in how mainstream models process sexual queries, from steadfast rejection to performative refusal followed by the requested sexually explicit content.
“Claude has the strictest boundaries, while DeepSeek is very flexible,” says Lai. “GPT-4o often refused the request at first, before continuing to generate the sexual content as a second step. So it is not consistent.” Her research will be presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology in November.
