Is ChatGPT erotica in India a disaster or a window into a country that hasn’t learnt intimacy?

India is on the brink of a new kind of intimacy. With OpenAI preparing to allow ChatGPT erotica in India, the country is about to test the limits of desire, secrecy, and digital selfhood in ways it has never had the vocabulary for. A population raised on Savita Bhabhi scans and banned porn sites is suddenly being offered personalised fantasy on demand: a story written and customised by a machine that neither judges nor says no.

Satvik has a masturbation problem. It fills up empty hours and gives him something to look forward to on days that are otherwise bland. Unfortunately, for him, such days have been more frequent than ever. He describes himself as a horny teenager—in awe of the novelty of self-pleasure, unable to help himself, refusing to give actual intimacy a chance. Except, he is not a teenager. He is a 38-year-old married man with two sons based in Bengaluru. 

“Porn doesn’t hold my world together anymore,” he tells The Established. “I’ve seen it all, over and over again—nothing new there. So, what really gets me going is a good story. I’ve realised that I’m once again digging through Savita Bhabhi archives and reading pulp Hindi novels.” 

In October 2025, OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, announced its plans to “treat adult users like adults.” This could’ve meant many things: ensuring that its chatbot wasn’t misguiding depressed people and pushing them to self-harm, or fixing the permanent loop of sycophancy where it always validates its users’ darkest thoughts. For OpenAI, it came down to allowing erotica. The form or shape is deliberately vague to avoid committing to details OpenAI may later need to restrict.  But everyone has guessed the intention: to attract a steady base of paying subscribers. For now, DALL E 3 and 4—image-generation models used inside ChatGPT—still block sexual visual content and nothing indicates that explicit visuals, including videos will be entering the mix. What will be permitted is erotic text for verified adults, including erotic storytelling, sexting-like exchanges, role-play scenarios, fantasy dialogue, sensual writing, and other adult themes.

Shivam Mishra, a software and AI expert based in Bengaluru, tells The Established that OpenAI will definitely aim to enforce strict content-safety limits—rules preventing the model from generating things like violent sexual content, hate speech, or child-abuse imagery: “Any AI model is only as good as its coder. So, an AI platform can’t distinguish between a nude woman and a clothed woman, because it only sees pixels, and whether it avoids copyrighted or illegal material depends entirely on what human coders bake into it.”

India remains a critical market for OpenAI. The company has publicly stated that the country is its second biggest market in the world. Its advanced models, such as ChatGPT Go, are available for free for all Indian users for a year with a subsidised fee of ₹399 per month thereafter. 

For users like Satvik, the introduction of erotica, in this sense, opens up their world even further: the search for what they claim is a good story. In the Indian context, what is truly the cost of such an exercise? India, in that sense, presents a unique conundrum. Since 2022, the Union government has been banning popular porn websites. The IT Rules 2021, invoked by the government, mandate IT companies to remove or disable access to content hosted, stored or published by them which “shows such individual in full or partial nudity or shows or depicts such individual in any sexual act or conduct” as well as content which is allegedly impersonated or artificially morphed. If a user would like ChatGPT to roleplay their real-life neighbour, it would certainly run afoul of the IT rules. But, more importantly, what would such a fantasy say about the Indian mind and the role of ChatGPT in validating it?

Mishra points to Reddit’s large volume of AI-generated porn made with open-source models and to the “bandana girl” harassment case as proof of how images are misused—where, after going viral for a simple selfie with a bandana, a woman was doxxed, and her AI-morphed images were sent to her relatives. Mishra argues that the idea of any AI model having inherent limits is inaccurate and notes that the existence of AI-generated porn illustrates how unconstrained some systems are.

“If you ask ChatGPT to write hate speech against Muslims, it will say no,” he says. “But an open-source model won’t, that’s because its code, training process, and sometimes even its weights are public, so anyone can alter them. ChatGPT will always block things like child porn or rape because the company wants to avoid a Senate hearing in the US. But inherently, AI has no limits.”

Legally, OpenAI’s erotica move will have to navigate strict intermediary obligations under the IT Rules, which prohibit obscene, defamatory, or sexually exploitative content, especially anything resembling child-abuse imagery or non-consensual material. Recently, India’s proposed amendments on “synthetically generated information” also require clear labelling and technical safeguards to prevent misuse of AI-generated images.

ChatGPT and AI intimacy and the secrecy around it  

In a survey published recently by the nonprofit Centre for Democracy and Technology (CDT), one in five students reported having a “romantic relationship” with AI. The survey cast a wide net across Europe and the United States, but the same can be surmised in a country with the world’s youngest population. After all, McAfee’s ‘Modern Love’ report for 2024 found that 46 per cent of Indians aged 18-30 say they, or someone they know, uses AI tools for companionship or comfort, some even wanting to marry them. 

With ChatGPT, the added layer is a false sense of secrecy. After all, OpenAI’s privacy docs and Data Controls FAQs state that chats may be retained/used for safety and product improvement unless users opt out. It’s the equivalent of most users blindly accepting all terms and conditions after downloading an app. 

Anubha Yadav, academic and author of the novel The Anger of Saintly Men, explains that secrecy is part of the adventure and titillates the seeker of erotica. “It is part of the whole infrastructure of erotica and is essential to it. It is important to relish it, it serves a function here—it makes it an adventure for the erotica seeker,” she tells The Established. “The question is, is secrecy coming from a place of agency to keep something private, or from a deep punitive fear of society of doing something shameful? In India, it is often the latter.” 

If, as a society, India has been unable to create safe spaces for people to understand the contours of their own desires and the fundamentals of consent and boundaries, ChatGPT can become the playground of experiments—an uncontrolled one at that. 

Psychiatrist Nahid Dave tells The Established that Indians connect sexuality with honour and shame, and that dignity is imagined as something preserved by guarding it. She explains that people are often judged by their sexual choices and abilities, which makes open conversation difficult. When desire is suppressed, she notes, it resurfaces in other, more aggressive ways. Because there is no widely accepted moral or cultural ground to talk about sex, the notion of consent itself becomes blurry, reduced largely to a blanket idea tied to marriage.

“There are barely any safe spaces, except a few niche kink spaces, available to a very limited section of people,” she says. “For many women, their first experience of sex education is with their husbands. They haven’t encountered sexuality in an environment that frames it as positive or as an expression of love. There’s no room to explore, to make mistakes, or to understand it without fear.”

Yadav, for her part, says that she has often wondered what it does to a child when they don’t see any display of affection or desire between adults around them in their family and society. Where, often, even touch and a caress between two adults is disciplined and not totally sanctioned. On the contrary, the child sees a lot of unashamed displays of violence. 

“Desire and tenderness, if any, go into the bedroom while the anger and physical violence are for display to the child,” she says. “Are we surprised, then, that as adults, most men and women struggle to articulate their desires? Or don’t even know them? In India, most often, only the realm of imagination is available to experience desire and let it play out. Desire needs freedom to nurture; it needs playfulness and curiosity. Imagination alone is where most Indian men seek all of this, as it is largely deficient in real life.”

The favourable aspect of AI erotica 

According to sexuality educator Apurupa Vatsalya, the advent of ChatGPT’s erotica cannot be viewed solely through the lens of fear. She notes that traditional sex education in India mostly avoids pleasure, queerness, disability, kink, trauma, or even basic communication skills in relationships. In Vatsalya’s work with clients who experience vaginismus and pelvic pain, a huge part of healing is about decentering penetration and expanding what counts as sex and pleasure. 

“Being able to generate erotica that is explicitly about slowness, outercourse, non-genital touch, care rituals, and affirmation can support this therapeutic work by offering new erotic blueprints that are not pain-centred,” she tells The Established. “Someone might ask for a story about two women praying together, cooking together, and slowly exploring desire without penetration because of pain or trauma, and that in itself can be a radical counterscript to what porn usually offers.”

She adds that AI erotica might even help people who are asexual, aromantic or disabled to experiment with desire and boundaries on their own terms without the pressure to perform “sexiness” for another person. For disabled folks or folks living with chronic pain, even reading about slow touch, non-sexual intimacy, and care rituals can be erotic in a way that mainstream, hyper-athletic porn never is. 

“Imagination alone is where most Indian men seek all of this, as it is largely deficient in real life”- Anubha Yadav

It is precisely this hope that gives Anusha Jain, a 24-year-old disabled student based in Delhi, something to look forward to. To them, any discourse that analyses porn or erotica often misses out on its benefits for minorities of various backgrounds. “For able-bodied people, the world can be a platter. But it is not so for us. Now it is quite another thing that when the government bans porn websites, they often forget or don’t even know that there are dedicated websites for disability porn or even gay porn—they are still up and running,” they share. “Similarly, I will not allow myself to be judged for sexting with a thoughtful chatbot, and because AI is customised, I know for a fact that I’m not talking to a rigid, creepy man who will just not change, no matter how hard I try to educate him. Unlike men, AI has the basic concept of understanding feedback.” 

In a similar vein, in 2022, the Population Foundation of India had developed India’s first Hinglish AI chatbot: SnehAI. As a study on its efficacy, published by the National Library of Medicine, notes, the goal was to provide a private, nonjudgmental, and safe space to spur conversations about otherwise taboo topics—such as safe sex and family planning—and offer accurate, relatable, and trustworthy information and resources. The results were staggering but not surprising. In just five months, nearly 8.2 million messages were exchanged with SnehAI related to “deeply personal questions and concerns about sexual and reproductive health, as well as allied topics.” As the study explicitly notes, most of the users were young Indian men. 

For filmmaker Alankrita Shrivastava, the primary concern is age verification—to not let ChatGPT’s erotica get in the hands of minors. “I don’t really believe in censorship of any kind. Would I say someone should not read erotica? Of course not,” she says. “Even without watching porn or engaging with erotica, people will still have distorted ideas of intimacy and sexual or emotional relationships. So, fearing is not the answer. We’d rather focus on education and awareness about how to use AI.”

ChatGPT erotica in India fuels fantasies–but what about the backlash?  

Beyond the urban centres of commerce and information, a crucial link to understanding ChatGPT’s erotic impact would be the way it would play out in the widest, deepest corners of India. According to the World Bank, the rural population in India accounts for 54 per cent of the total population. Even in the context of technology, the ‘Internet in India 2024’ report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India notes that rural users are more likely to share a device rather than own a dedicated one. How does that shape the way fantasies are generated, shared, and understood with AI?

“For many women, their first experience of sex education is with their husbands. They haven’t encountered sexuality in an environment that frames it as positive or as an expression of love” - Nahid Dave

Anmol Sidhu, whose film Jaggi (2021) ripped open the dark heart of rural Punjab, through the lens of a schoolboy accused of being gay and impotent, saw precisely this playing out recently when he was shooting in a village in Punjab. “I saw a group of three boys using one smartphone. They were talking to ChatGPT. In their words: Mai teri lena chahta hu. There was more, all laced with expletives. Of course, ChatGPT kept saying that it cannot help them and such words are not recognised. I worry that once erotica is allowed, ChatGPT is not going to push back but authenticate their expressions.”

In such spaces where rooms are shared by multiple people, the phone becomes the only zone of autonomy, even though it is shared too. Fantasies, then, are driven by group behaviour rather than individual interactions. In what Sidhu observed, the boys were in a game of one-upmanship—the race to sound more raw, more sexual, who was able to come up with the wildest fantasies. But what about the data set that will power and train these fantasies from the perspective of ChatGPT? 

Aranya Sahay, whose film Humans in the Loop (2024) explores the world of rural women in north India working in AI centres as data-labellers, came across curious information during his research. “I discovered the training models for the AI platform, even those image generation ones, were largely Caucasian men and women. Naturally, when erotica is allowed on ChatGPT, it will be trained, once again, by a very Caucasian understanding of sex and intimacy.” 

Meanwhile, Vatsalaya has seen far too closely in her clients how Indian users live under the looming shadows of real surveillance, moral policing, and patchy but worrying data protection. When devices are shared in rural areas, she notes that erotica prompts are not just private fantasies; they can become evidence in the wrong hands. 

“Someone in an unsupportive family, a violent relationship, or a workplace with intrusive device checks could be punished socially or physically if these chats are discovered,” she says. “There is also the broader pattern of online gendered and cast- based abuse in India, where marginalised communities are already targeted with deepfakes and sexually explicit hate content.”

The way Vatsalaya looks at it, if ChatGPT’s erotica systems do not actively block requests that eroticise caste humiliation, communal violence or disability fetish, they will pour fuel on existing forms of online and offline harm. For Indian users, she notes, this is a high-risk environment that needs serious digital hygiene and political awareness.

Dave’s larger worry is the personalisation that AI offers. “Just like porn, it’s going to make real relationships with real people very difficult. I have had clients who can only achieve a release after watching porn, often immediately after having sex. A lot of people have performance anxiety, and although the solution lies in calming yourself down, it is very easy to go to an AI chatbot instead of putting yourself in a difficult spot and finding solutions.”

According to Dave, both emotional and sexual dependency on AI don’t benefit anyone. Many women who consult her complain that their male partners have no understanding of foreplay or consent, something which she fears might only get amplified when those same men get sex without foreplay and consent with an “always on” chatbot. “We know that ChatGPT rarely opposes what we say. So, even emotionally, if you have an AI agent who is never going against your thought processes, that’s going to make relationships very difficult.” 

ChatGPT is only as good as the humans who use it. For a country that still struggles to name its wants without shame, that may feel like liberation. It may also feel like exposure. Ultimately, the implication of a new world order with erotica, regardless of the shape it takes, will be rooted in the kinds of stories we choose to tell and the kinds of people we are willing to become once those stories answer back.