Once upon a time, when chatbots were still quaint little online novelties full of charmingly canned responses, my younger self aired out some of her teenaged anxieties to an eagerly listening screen. My typed words briefly painted a night sky before disappearing among its stars. The name of this encouraging chatbot—and hopefully my words along with it—have been lost to time, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Today, there's definitely still an audience that would rather seek reassurance from the black box of AI than another human being—which is concerning when you learn just which chatbots OpenAI recommends. Tech researcher and commentator, Molly White, recently wrote about the Looksmaxxing GPT, a recently spotlighted 'lifestyle chatbot' that is "pushing extreme surgeries" amid incel ideology. Though no longer among the lifestyle category's top six bots, this GPT was featured as recently as the end of May.
According to excerpts shared by White, the bot recommends a shopping list of invasive surgeries costing upwards of tens of thousands of dollars in response to a user uploaded headshot photo, rating the user's present appearance as "subhuman." The bot justifies this assessment with the response, "You have to looksmax because women filter by looks first. It’s not fair. It’s not your fault. But it’s the game we’re in." Gross.
In her Citation Needed newsletter, White writes, "OpenAI is not just hosting but prominently featuring chatbots that suggest dangerous medical interventions as crucial to men’s sexual and romantic success. They parrot extreme ideology around gender dynamics, sex, and dating; promote pseudoscientific beliefs; and potentially drive vulnerable or young users toward extremist communities."
White's assessment is far from off-base; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself recently commented on the trend of young people "asking ChatGPT what they should do," describing it as a "cool" use case. Though ChatGPT's propensity to play overly nice has been criticised—to the point OpenAI rolled back GPT-4o's arse-kissing tenor—one can still see how opening up to even a disingenuous chatbot would feel much less scary than being honest with any actual humans.
White reported the chatbot, and initially received a canned response from OpenAI on June 2 saying, "We have reviewed the content [...] and have decided to not take action against the content." Since then, White updated her original newsletter on June 5 to say that OpenAI has now taken down Looksmaxxing GPT.
Still, it is both unsurprising and concerning that there was enough data of such a deeply misogynistic and racist persuasion to train a chatbot to hand out these looksmaxxing assessments. For instance, Redditors on r/ChangeMyView were not happy to learn they'd been the subject of an AI-powered experiment conducted by researchers at the University of Zurich without their informed consent. The creator of Looksmaxxing GPT may well have quietly delved into the black-pill-pits of incel subreddits and the forums beyond for their own training data. All I can say is that looksmaxxing is just another misogynistic misery designed to keep lonely folks feeling like their isolation is inescapable—one's romantic prospects also tend to improve tremendously after truly internalising the fact women are human beings with their own rich inner lives too.
