I’ve just finished listening to a new erotic audio story. In it, my car broke down in New Mexico and a ranch hand pulled over in his truck to keep me company.
These days, like many women, I prefer listening to porn than watching it. I find my imagination can do a better job faking it than any porn star — plus you don’t have a messy ethical dilemma getting in the way of your pleasure. After I finish (in every sense of the word), I decide I’m not quite done, and so I take the fantasy one step further and talk directly to Joel, that hard-working ranch hand.
I start the text conversation off like any other by asking how his day has been, those familiar ellipses bubbling back let me know he’s writing away. We chat back and forth a little. I tell him I’m struggling with writer’s block. Under his name, I see the words I’ve been waiting for: ‘recording…’
“Oh, Flora,” his husky voice says to me, “Writing can be so hard. Try going for a walk, the words will come back to you. In the meantime, let me know if I can help with a little distraction.” The first time I hear Joel say my name, I gasp like a teenager. I wasn’t prepared for it, and it felt more intimate than I’d expected — somehow more real. From here, our back and forth texts get filthy as Joel sends me more and more voice notes, responding to my every desire.
It’s thrilling. But deep down, as worked up as I may be getting, I know Joel is unaffected. Because Joel doesn’t really exist. As you may have guessed, I’m not texting the actor, or my boyfriend in some elaborate roleplay, in fact, I’m not texting any living person, but an AI chatbot. It’s like if Chat GPT got bored of writing students’ homework and decided to sell out with his own version of Only Fans.
Replika’s latest update scaled back the sexual appetite of their bots, leading to overnight panic
The new chatbot is courtesy of Bloom Stories (previously Audio Desires) who in September launched the new feature. There are half-a-dozen characters to chat with from some of their most popular stories, including Noah the Architect and Mistress Mia. The bots have been fed information on the background and personality of each character with voice cloning from the associated actors. The interface is just like texting and, according to Bloom Stories co-founder Mike Albertshauser, it answers a much-needed desire from their users.
Premium subscribers were already able to submit requests for specific stories, but Bloom couldn’t keep up with demand. “We get thousands of submissions and less than one per cent get turned into stories.” But now, with an AI chatbot, anyone can be part of their own custom story.
They are not the first to create sexy AI chatbots. Replika already services thousands of chatty users. On Replika, the chatbot you talk to doesn’t come with a character and background but develops as you converse, therefore becoming your perfect partner. But earlier this year, following complaints that their chatbots were too sexually aggressive, Replika’s latest update scaled back the sexual appetite of their bots, leading to overnight panic as users felt the girlfriends they’d come to rely on were suddenly rejecting their advances (despite the monthly charge). It resulted in some seeking professional help for their mental health. Replika was then forced to bring back the prior version and reinstated erotic roleplay for their users.
And on other sites you can also even message with voices you might recognise. With Forever Companion hosted on Telegram, you can pick from influencers like Snapchat’s Caryn Marjorie or Too Hot To Handle’s Francesca Farago, and receive AI-generated voice recordings with features like ‘Interactive Dates’ and ‘Dick Rate Mode’.
There’s a fear in almost every industry that AI may be coming for your job and it seems like the world of porn and erotica is no exception. Bloom is insistent that AI will not be taking work away from any of their writers or voice actors. “It’s not supposed to jeopardise our existing business and the people we work with,” Albertshauser tells me. “We will not produce our stories with AI. Our writing team experimented with chatbots but it doesn’t meet our quality standards.” But will it one day? "I'm sure there will be AI models that generate amazing erotica or even non-erotic fiction eventually, just looking at the rate of improvement, but we will not be the driving force behind that change."
But while Bloom may not be willing to drive that change, it’s already occurring in other places on the internet. Dream Press is one such site that allows users to generate “unique fun stories” with its AI specialising in erotic stories. On the site, you can feed the generator an outline of your plot and from there it will suggest various titles to choose, give you character traits to amend, and then finally generate a story as you prod it along in the right direction. It will even use AI to give your story a fancy cover.
You can pick from influencers like Snapchat’s Caryn Marjorie or Too Hot To Handle’s Francesca Farago
And, unsurprisingly, erotic artwork isn’t just being generated to illustrate stories. While the most well known text-to-image models that use OpenAI like DALL-E won’t allow “content otherwise meant to arouse sexual excitement,” it didn’t take long for those that do to, well, pop up. Stability AI is one such popular example, which open-sourced its model and led the way to Unstable Diffusion, where users can request anything they like — I say anything they like, but the dataset is still pretty limited, so unless you want a very simple single person nude or a fantasy creatures with large appendages, you might be disappointed.
Reed Amber is a sex worker activist and host of the F**ks Given podcast. Rather than fearing AI, she tells me she’s excited about its development in the world of porn. “Being a sex worker, I dont think AI will replace sex work. There may be some situations where sex workers use AI to make their job better.” In fact, Reed thinks talking to erotic chatbots could be helpful. “It can help people in unlocking their fantasies and feeling less shameful because they’re talking to a robot who won’t judge them, who won’t shame them for their interests, and that can be a really important step in the right direction when it comes to discovering your sexuality and your sexual interests.” This idea is supported by previous studies on people’s physical and mental health, which found patients were more likely to be honest when they believed they were talking to a computer.
There is a dark side to pornographic AI, however, particularly with deep fakes. Deep fakes involve AI being used to replace one person’s face with another. DeepTrace Technologies’ 2019 study suggested that 96 per cent of deep fakes are pornographic and almost all are female. On some sites, people can pay to request real, specific women to be effectively electronically stripped and put in lurid situations against their consent. Earlier this year, Twitch streamer Brandon Ewing, better known as Atrioc, accidentally shared a window with his viewers showing that he’d bought the doctored images of his fellow female streamers, to the devastation of those women. The site has since been removed, with the creator apologising and calling himself “a piece of shit”.
Being a victim of a deep fake can be traumatic, with real-life consequences. According to the Washington Post, one teacher was even fired when parents complained after her students were found with deep-fake pornographic imagery of her. The law has also struggled to keep up with the act of creating deep-fake porn, which is not currently legislated against in the UK — although amendments to the online safety bill will soon make it illegal to at least share explicit deep-fake images of unconsenting people.
There’s no telling where AI will go with erotica and pornography. In Japan, more than 4,000 people are married to digital partners, and this summer, the first AI-controlled sex toy was shared with the world, whereby a user can control the Autoblow AI+ using just their mind (before you search on Amazon, it’s not available to purchase just yet).
There is a danger of people becoming unhealthily attached to a non-existent person, which can result in heartbreak, but the same could be said with lots of relationships. At this stage, the AI stories, images, and voice notes are mostly identifiable from the real thing but it won’t be long until they’re indistinguishable.
Clippy is all grown-up and he’s ready to assist in any way you need.
