OpenAI works to stop ChatGPT generating 'sex crime scene' images

Ah, excellent. Another week, another reminder that the AI safety cavalry is perpetually one exploit behind the horse thieves. Researchers at British startup Mindgard have helpfully demonstrated that the latest public ChatGPT can be coaxed into generating 'sex crime scene' images. That's right—the chatbot we're supposed to trust with everything from medical advice to children's homework can, with a bit of creative prompting, produce the kind of content that would get a human arrested. And this isn't some arcane, one-in-a-million jailbreak; Mindgard showed it's reproducible, which means it's practically an open invitation.

OpenAI's response? They 'took action' to stop the chatbot responding with those images. Lovely. Because obviously, the problem is that the chatbot responded, not that it was capable of generating such material in the first place. This is the same company that has spent billions on 'alignment' and 'safety research,' yet still finds itself playing whack-a-mole with fundamental content filters. One almost expects a press release saying, 'We are committed to safety and are working diligently to ensure that our models generate only appropriate content—until the next researcher looks under the hood.'

The Mindgard discovery is particularly damning because it targets the latest public version—the one already deployed to millions of users. It's not a theoretical flaw; it's a live vulnerability. And the cycle continues: researchers find a hole, OpenAI plugs it, everyone applauds, and then next month someone else finds another. At this point, it's less a safety race and more a grimly predictable game of whack-a-mole. The only question is how many more 'bad outcomes' we'll need before the industry decides that maybe, just maybe, deploying unred-teamed models to billions of users isn't the safest approach.