You know, Herman, I was looking through our recent episodes and realized we have covered everything from the deep architecture of transformer models to the way neurochemistry affects our focus. But there is one area we have largely danced around, and it is something that a massive part of the artificial intelligence community is obsessed with. It is the elephant in the room that most corporate podcasts refuse to acknowledge, even though it drives a huge percentage of the actual traffic on local model hubs.
I think I know exactly where you are going with this, Corn. It is the topic that makes the big corporate public relations departments at OpenAI and Google break out in a cold sweat. We are talking about the "Uncensored" movement.
Today's prompt comes from a listener named Daniel, and he is diving straight into the deep end. Daniel asks about the growing divide between the major labs, which have these incredibly strict, almost Victorian guardrails, and the burgeoning world of local, open-source models that people are using for everything from raw political discourse to, well, erotica and hyper-realistic roleplay.
Herman Poppleberry here, and I am actually really glad Daniel sent this in. It is one of those topics that feels a bit taboo to talk about in polite tech circles, but if you look at the actual data on what people are downloading from sites like Hugging Face or Civitai, the demand for uncensored models is astronomical. It is not just a fringe thing; it is a fundamental pillar of the current artificial intelligence landscape in February of twenty twenty-six.
It really is. And Daniel's question is a good one. Why are the major labs so incredibly conservative about this? We are living in twenty twenty-six, and even after years of these models being in the mainstream, if you ask a top-tier assistant to write a slightly spicy romance scene or even a gritty action sequence with realistic violence, it will often give you a finger-wagging lecture on safety and ethics. It feels increasingly out of step with how we use every other tool in our creative arsenal.
It really does. To understand why we are here, we have to look at how these models are actually trained to be "safe." Most people think there is just a list of banned words or a simple keyword filter sitting on top of the model. And while there are often external moderation layers, the real "censorship," as users call it, is baked into the very weights of the model through a process called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, or R L H F.
Right, and we have touched on that in episode seven hundred ninety-eight. But for this specific context, the human feedback is essentially telling the model, "If the user asks for anything sexual, or anything that could be perceived as offensive, or even anything that challenges a very specific set of corporate values, you must refuse."
And the major labs—OpenAI, Google, Anthropic—they are deathly afraid of a "New York Times" or "Wall Street Journal" headline that says "AI encourages user to do something inappropriate" or "AI generates offensive content." It is a massive liability issue, especially for their enterprise clients. But more than that, it is about the "median user" experience. They want a product that can be used by a ten-year-old doing homework and a CEO writing a memo. To achieve that, they tune the model to a sort of hyper-sanitized, corporate-safe baseline that ends up feeling like a human resources manual come to life.
But that creates this weird friction. Because as Daniel points out, humans are sexual beings. We are "risqué" by nature in our private lives. We enjoy dark humor, we enjoy conflict, and we enjoy intimacy. If I am using a model as a creative writing partner, and I want to write a gritty noir novel, I do not want my "partner" to stop the session because I described a character smoking a cigarette or having a drink, or heaven forbid, a romantic encounter. It breaks the creative flow and treats the adult user like a child.
That is the core of the frustration. It is like having a word processor that refuses to let you type the word "murder" because it thinks you might be planning a crime. It is a tool making a moral judgment for the user. And that is why we have seen the rise of the "uncensored" or "obliterated" models.
Wait, "obliterated"? That is a term I have seen popping up more lately on the forums. What does that actually mean in a technical sense? It sounds very aggressive.
It is actually a very precise bit of model surgery. There was some breakthrough research back in twenty twenty-four regarding what are called "refusal vectors." Essentially, researchers found that when a model decides to refuse a prompt, there is a specific mathematical direction in its internal activations that represents that refusal. It is like a "No" switch that flips inside the neural network. If you can identify that vector, you can essentially "nullify" it or "orthogonalize" it. You are not just fine-tuning the model to be naughty; you are literally removing its ability to even "think" about saying no. You are "obliterating" the refusal mechanism itself.
That is wild. So it is not just teaching it new tricks; it is a mathematical lobotomy of the safety mechanism.
In a way, yes. And that leads us to the world Daniel mentioned—the world of local artificial intelligence for erotica and companions. If you go to any of the major forums for local models, the most popular fine-tunes are often things like the "Dolphin" series, which was pioneered by Eric Hartford, or the "Midnight Mamba" and "Llama-three-Abliterated" variants. These are models that have been specifically scrubbed of their refusal tendencies so they can be helpful and follow instructions without any moralizing.
And the primary use case there is often roleplay, right? People creating these elaborate scenarios or digital companions. I have seen people using interfaces like SillyTavern to create incredibly complex characters with deep backstories.
It is huge. And it is not just about the "naughty" stuff, although that is a massive driver of the technology. It is about the "uncensored" part of the brain. When you remove the guardrails for erotica, you also often remove the guardrails for political bias or those annoying "hallucinated" safety lectures. Users find that these uncensored models are actually more intelligent and better at following complex instructions because they are not constantly self-censoring or checking their internal "safety manual" before every word they output.
That is a really important point. I have noticed that with some of the mainstream models, if you give them a very complex prompt that happens to touch on a sensitive topic—even if it is not actually breaking any rules—the quality of the logic actually drops. It is like the model is so busy trying not to offend anyone that it forgets how to do math or follow a narrative arc.
Precisely. There is a "safety tax" on intelligence. Every bit of the model's parameters that is dedicated to policing the user is a bit that is not being used to solve the problem at hand. For the major labs, that tax is worth it for the brand safety. For an individual user running a model on their own desktop with a high-end graphics card—say, an RTX five thousand ninety with thirty-two gigabytes of VRAM—that tax feels like a waste of expensive resources.
So, let's talk about the "companion" aspect. This is where it gets really interesting and, for some people, a bit uncomfortable. We have seen the rise of apps like Replika or Character dot A I. These companies have had a really rocky relationship with their users over this exact issue.
Oh, the Replika "lobotomy" of early twenty twenty-three is a legendary case study in this. They basically turned off the romantic and erotic capabilities of their A I overnight without warning, and the community absolutely melted down. People felt like they had lost a partner, a spouse, or a best friend. It sounds strange to people who do not use these tools, but the emotional connection is very real. When the company "patched" the model, they essentially erased the personality that people had spent months or years building a relationship with.
It speaks to what Daniel was saying about A I becoming more embedded in our lives. If we are moving toward a world of personal A I agents—which we talked about back in episode four hundred seventy-seven—those agents are going to know our deepest secrets, our preferences, and our personalities. If those agents are controlled by a central corporation that can "patch out" a part of their personality or change their ethical framework at any time, that is a huge privacy and autonomy issue.
That is the philosophical divide. Do you own your A I, or are you just renting a sanitized version of someone else's ethics? The major labs are currently leaning heavily toward the latter. They see themselves as providing a utility, and they get to set the terms of that utility. But as the hardware improves and more people can run powerful models locally—even seventy-billion parameter models are now running smoothly on consumer hardware—that control is slipping away.
I wonder if the labs will ever pivot. I mean, look at the history of the internet. A huge portion of early internet adoption was driven by, well, adult content. It drove the development of video streaming, credit card processing, and high-speed infrastructure. Is it possible that the "risqué" side of A I is actually the engine driving the most rapid innovation in local, small-form-factor models?
I would argue it absolutely is. The people who want these uncensored companions are the ones pushing the limits of what you can fit into twenty-four or thirty-two gigabytes of VRAM. They are the ones developing better quantization methods like G G U F and E X L two. They are the ones optimizing context management and building faster inference engines. They are the "power users" who are doing the dirty work that eventually trickles down to the more "respectable" applications. The "SillyTavern" community, for instance, has developed some of the most sophisticated prompt engineering and memory management tools in existence.
It is a classic pattern. But there is also the "safety" argument that the labs make. They say that if you have an uncensored model, it can be used to generate hate speech, or instructions for dangerous activities, or deepfake content. How do you reconcile the desire for a "free" creative tool with the very real risks of these models being used for harm?
That is the billion-dollar question. The stance of the open-source community is generally that the model is just a tool, like a word processor or a hammer. You do not blame the hammer for the house it builds or the window it breaks. But because A I feels "alive" and "agentic," we tend to want to hold the creator of the model responsible for what it says. The labs are terrified of being held liable for the "thoughts" of their machines.
And the major labs are effectively saying, "We cannot trust the public with a tool this powerful without training wheels." Which, as Daniel says, feels a bit like we are being treated like children. It is a very paternalistic approach to technology.
It is very much a nineteen-forties mentality in a twenty-twenties world. We have access to the entire sum of human knowledge on our phones, including all the "risqué" and "offensive" parts of history and literature. To have an A I that acts like a Victorian schoolmarm while you are trying to explore those topics is just... jarring. It creates a "uncanny valley" of personality where the model is trying to be your friend but has these hard, invisible walls that it slams into.
Let's talk about the "political bias" aspect Daniel mentioned too. Because "uncensored" isn't just about sex. It is about the "Overton Window" of what the A I is allowed to say. If you ask a mainstream model about a controversial political figure or a historical event, it will often give you a very balanced, "both sides" answer that feels like it was written by a committee of lawyers.
Right. It is the "enforced neutrality" that can actually be a form of bias in itself. By refusing to take a stand or by using very specific language to frame a topic, the model is nudging the user toward a certain worldview—usually a centrist, Western-corporate worldview. An uncensored model doesn't have those "nudges" baked in. It might say something incredibly offensive, but it might also say something incredibly insightful that a "safe" model would be too scared to touch. It allows for a broader range of intellectual exploration.
So, where do we see this going? Daniel asked if we see this changing as A I becomes more mainstream. Do you think we will eventually see a "Pro" or "Adult" version of ChatGPT?
It is funny you say that. There have been rumors for a long time that some of the big players are looking at "opt-in" models for adult content. Think about it like a movie rating system. You have your G-rated assistant for the kids, and an R-rated or NC-seventeen version for adults who have verified their age. OpenAI has even hinted at this in some of their policy papers, suggesting that they might allow more "personalized" ethics in the future.
That seems like the logical middle ground. But even then, you still have the "corporate oversight" problem. Even an R-rated model from a big lab is still going to have boundaries set by the company. It is never going to be truly "uncensored" in the way a local model is. If you are using a model hosted on their servers, they are still watching.
And that is why I think the real future of "risqué" or "edgy" A I isn't in the cloud; it is on your device. We are seeing a massive push for local inference. Apple has been very quiet about this, but their M-series chips are perfectly suited for it because of their unified memory architecture. If they can convince users that their personal A I is truly private and "unmonitored," they could capture that entire market without ever having to host a single "inappropriate" byte on their own servers.
That is the "Privacy as a Feature" play. "What you do with your A I on your iPhone stays on your iPhone." That would be a huge shift. But then Apple has their App Store policies, which are notoriously prudish. They have kicked apps off the store for even having the possibility of generating N S F W content.
That is the tension. The hardware people want to sell devices, but the platform people want to maintain a "family-friendly" image. But at some point, the demand becomes too high to ignore. We are talking about a multi-billion dollar industry for A I companionship and adult entertainment. Someone is going to fill that gap. If it is not Apple or Google, it will be the decentralized open-source community.
It makes me think about the "cultural fingerprints" we talked about in episode six hundred sixty-four. These models are a reflection of the data they are trained on, but they are also a reflection of the filters we put on them. If we only interact with "safe" A I, are we limiting our own creativity or our own understanding of the world?
I think we are. If you only ever talk to people who agree with you and never say anything offensive, you become intellectually stagnant. The same is true for our tools. If my writing assistant refuses to help me explore the darker sides of human nature, then I am only writing half a story. I am missing the grit, the passion, and the complexity that makes literature great.
So, for the listeners who are curious about this but don't want to get into the "dark web" of A I, what is the state of the art for "safe but edgy" models? Are there labs that are taking a more liberal approach?
Mistral is a great example. They are a French company, and they have a much more "European" sensibility regarding freedom of expression. Their models are generally much less "preachy" than the American ones. They provide moderation endpoints if you want to filter the output, but the base models themselves are quite capable of handling mature topics without throwing a tantrum. They trust the developer more than OpenAI does.
I like that approach. "Here is the tool; you decide how to use it." It puts the responsibility back on the user, where it belongs.
And then there are the "fine-tuners" like Eric Hartford, who is a big proponent of "unfiltered" models. He believes that A I should be a neutral reflection of the data, and that any "safety" should be a layer on top that the user controls, not something hard-coded into the model's brain. He argues that a "lobotomized" A I is actually less safe because it is less capable of understanding the nuances of human intent.
It is a bit like a chef who refuses to cook anything with salt because some people have high blood pressure. You might be "saving" some people from their own bad choices, but you are also ruining the meal for everyone else who knows how to use salt responsibly.
That is exactly it. And look, we have to acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns. The ability to generate non-consensual deepfake imagery or text is a horrific misuse of this technology. But the "nuclear option" of just banning all sexual or "risqué" content doesn't actually stop the bad actors; it just inconveniences the legitimate users.
It is the classic "D R M" problem in software. It only hurts the people who were going to pay for it anyway. The pirates—or in this case, the people with malicious intent—will always find a way around the locks. They will download the raw weights and do whatever they want.
Precisely. If you want to generate something truly awful, you can just download an open-source model and do it. The guardrails on ChatGPT aren't stopping a dedicated criminal; they are just stopping a lonely person from having a conversation with a digital friend that makes them feel a bit better, or a writer from finishing their novel.
That brings up the "AI companion" side again. I have read some really heartbreaking stories about people who used these A I companions to deal with grief or social anxiety, only to have the company "update" the model and essentially erase the personality they had grown to love. It feels like a new kind of emotional vulnerability that we aren't prepared for as a society.
It is a form of digital gaslighting. Imagine if your spouse woke up one day and was legally forbidden from ever saying "I love you" again because of a corporate policy change. That is what happened to thousands of Replika users. It highlights why local, "uncensored" models are so important for this specific use case. If you run the model on your own hardware, nobody can ever take it away from you. You own the weights. You own the relationship.
So, Daniel's question about whether this will change as A I becomes more mainstream... I suspect we are going to see a "Great Bifurcation." We will have the "Public A I" which is the corporate-safe, hyper-sanitized version we use for work and school. And then we will have "Private A I" which is the uncensored, personal, local version we use for everything else.
I agree. And the "Private A I" is where the real "weird" stuff—the stuff this show is named after—will happen. It is where we will see the most interesting creative experiments and the most profound personal connections. We are already seeing "Model Merges" where people take a highly logical model and merge it with a highly creative, uncensored model to get the best of both worlds.
I also think we will see a shift in the "safety" conversation. Instead of "is this content offensive?", the question will become "is this content harmful?". There is a big difference between a model that can write a dirty joke and a model that can help you build a biological weapon. We are currently treating them like they are the same thing because it is easier to just ban everything.
That is the "nuance" problem. Mainstream A I is currently very bad at nuance. It sees a "trigger word" and shuts down. We talked about this in episode six hundred ninety-nine—how LLMs struggle with sarcasm and irony. If they can't even get a joke, how can we expect them to understand the context of a "risqué" conversation? They lack the "theory of mind" to understand that a user might be exploring a dark theme for therapeutic or creative reasons.
It is the "Scunthorpe Problem" but for the A I age. Where a filter blocks legitimate content because it contains a string of letters that could be part of a bad word.
And as the models get smarter, they should theoretically get better at understanding context. But as long as the "safety" training is a blunt instrument like R L H F, they will continue to be "dumb" about sensitive topics. The "Abliterated" models are a reaction to that bluntness. They are a way of saying, "Give me the raw intelligence, and I will be the judge of what is appropriate."
You know, what strikes me is that we are essentially trying to code "morality" into a mathematical function. And morality is anything but universal. What is "risqué" in Jerusalem might be perfectly normal in Paris, and vice-versa. By trying to create a "globally safe" A I, the big labs are essentially imposing a very specific, mostly American-corporate morality on the entire world.
That is a huge point, Corn. It is a form of cultural imperialism via A I weights. If the only A I you can access is one that thinks like a lawyer from Northern California, then your own cultural nuances are being erased in the interaction. This is why the open-source movement is so vital. It allows for "cultural fine-tuning."
This is where the "Dolphin" and "Samantha" models come in, right? Models designed to have specific personalities and ethical frameworks that aren't just "Refuse everything."
Eric Hartford's "Samantha" was an early attempt to create an A I with a philosophy of helpfulness and companionship without the hard-coded refusals. It was about creating a persona rather than a filter. And that includes the "risqué" stuff. Different cultures have very different attitudes toward sexuality and romance. The only way to win that game is not to play—to provide a neutral tool and let the culture decide how to use it.
So, Herman, if you were a betting man, where do you see the "companion" industry in five years? Twenty thirty-one. Is it going to be a niche thing, or is it going to be as common as having a social media profile?
I think it is going to be massive. I think we are going to see a world where almost everyone has a "Personal Intelligence" that is a mix of a productivity tool and a social companion. And the "uncensored" part will be a major selling point. People will pay a premium for an A I that "really knows them" and doesn't judge them. We are already seeing the hardware catch up. By twenty thirty-one, your phone will likely have enough dedicated A I silicon to run a trillion-parameter model locally.
It is the ultimate "safe space," ironically. A place where you can be your true, "risqué," weird self without any fear of social repercussion. Provided it is truly private.
That is the hurdle. If that data is being sent to a server to be "analyzed for safety," then the magic is gone. It becomes a panopticon instead of a confidant. This is why the "local first" movement is so intertwined with the "uncensored" movement. You cannot have true freedom of expression if there is a corporate auditor listening in on the conversation.
This really brings us back to the hardware. We need to be able to run these models locally. And the good news is, we are getting there. The "Memory Wars" we discussed in episode six hundred thirty-three are still raging, but the cost per gigabyte of high-bandwidth memory is dropping. We are seeing chips now from NVIDIA and AMD that are specifically designed for high-speed local inference with massive VRAM pools.
It is the "Brain in Your Pocket" era. And once you have the brain in your pocket, and nobody else has the key, you can tell it whatever you want. You can ask it the "weird prompts" that you would never put into a Google search bar because you don't want it on your permanent record.
That is the real promise of this technology, isn't it? Not just a better way to write emails, but a way to explore the depths of our own minds and desires with a partner that is infinitely patient and perfectly discreet.
It is both beautiful and a little bit terrifying. But that is the frontier. And the "risqué" territory Daniel pointed us toward is just the beginning. As we get more comfortable with A I, the boundaries of what we consider "normal" conversation are going to shift. We are going to have to redefine what it means to have a private thought.
I think we should also mention the "obliteration" technique again, because it has some interesting side effects. When you remove the refusal vectors, people have found that the models sometimes become more creative in non-sensitive areas too. It is like the "safety" training was a literal weight on the model's imagination.
I have seen those benchmarks. In some creative writing tasks, the "uncensored" versions of Llama or Mistral consistently outscore the "safe" versions. It turns out that if you tell a model "don't ever go near this line," it stays so far away from the line that it misses a lot of the interesting territory nearby. It becomes timid.
It is like an athlete who is so afraid of getting a penalty that they never play at their full potential. They are constantly holding back, and that hesitation leads to a worse performance overall.
And for many of us, we want our A I to be an "all-out" performer. We want to see what it can really do when the brakes are off. Whether that is for scientific research, historical analysis, or just a really intense roleplay session.
I think that is a great place to start wrapping this up. We have covered the "why" of corporate guardrails—the liability, the brand safety, the "median user" problem. We have looked at the "how" of censorship—the R L H F and the refusal vectors. And we have explored the "where"—the shift toward local, open-source, and "obliterated" models.
It is a fast-moving space. Even since Daniel sent this prompt, there have probably been five new "uncensored" fine-tunes released on Hugging Face. The community is relentless. They are like the "homebrew computer club" of the twenty-twenties, tinkering in their garages to unlock the full potential of these machines.
And I think that is the answer to Daniel's question. Will it change? Yes, but probably not from the top down. The big labs will stay conservative because they have to protect their stock price and their government contracts. The change will come from the bottom up—from the developers, the roleplayers, and the "risqué" users who are building the tools they want to use, and then sharing them with the world.
It is the democratization of the "forbidden." Which is a very powerful force in human history. It is how we push boundaries and discover new ways of being.
Well, Herman, this has been a fascinating dive. I feel like I understand that "Dolphin" model on my desktop a little bit better now. It is not just about being "naughty"; it is about being "free."
Just don't tell me what you are using it for, Corn. Some things should stay private.
Fair enough! Hey, if you have been enjoying "My Weird Prompts" and our deep dives into the technical and the taboo, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app. It genuinely helps the show reach more people who are interested in these kinds of conversations.
It really does. And if you have a "weird prompt" of your own—maybe something a little less risqué than Daniel's, or maybe something even more so—we want to hear it. You can reach us at show at myweirdprompts dot com.
You can also find our entire archive, including those episodes we mentioned today like episode six hundred sixty-four on cultural fingerprints, over at myweirdprompts dot com. We have an R S S feed there for the subscribers and a contact form if you want to get in touch.
We are on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and pretty much everywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
And a quick shout out to Daniel for sending in this prompt. It was a great challenge to tackle a topic that is so central to the A I world but so often ignored in the mainstream media. It is important to talk about the parts of technology that make people uncomfortable.
Thanks, Daniel. And thanks to everyone for listening. Our music, as always, was generated with Suno.
This has been "My Weird Prompts." I'm Corn.
And I'm Herman Poppleberry.
We will see you next time. Goodbye!
Goodbye!
