"We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realise this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right," Sam Altman posted on X.

He said: "Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases."

Speaking on the new version of ChatGPT, Altman said: "In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing)."

ChatGPT has added the new feature amid Elon Musk's xAI's move to add elements in the Grok chatbot, making it deliberately provocative.

It has a flirtatious female avatar that can strip on command, a chatbot that toggles between "sexy" and "unhinged" modes, and an image and video generation feature with a "spicy" setting, Business Insider reported.

Reacting to ChatGPT's new stance, AI intimacy expert Bryony Cole and host of The Future of Sex podcast tells NewsNation the “toothpaste is out of the tube."

“It mimics texting with a friend or a boyfriend or a girlfriend. It’s very much simulating the intimacy that we experience with our partners through text, but the difference is, it’s synthetic,” Cole said on Elizabeth Vargas Reports.