The Erotic Ghost in the Machine: AI Porn and the Future of Flesh
Thursday, May 1, 2025.
There was a time, not long ago, when porn came in the form of a VHS tape hidden inside a cereal box in your uncle’s garage.
Erotic curiosity meant faded Playboy magazines, elbowy make-outs, and the persistent question: Is this how it’s supposed to feel?
Now, with the miracle of generative AI, you can summon your ideal sex partner like a horny sorcerer: “Alexa, make her shorter, sadder, and emotionally naive.”
And lo—she appears.
The Archives of Sexual Behavior recently chronicled this brave new world: 36 platforms offering build-a-lover technology that allows you to control everything from eye color to emotional neediness.
Want a sultry goth redhead girlfriend with a 1960’s haircut with bangs who talks like an audiobook narrator and hates your ex?
Done.
Prefer a cowboy with a PhD in philosophy and a submissive streak?
Also done.
Just click, prompt, unzip, repeat.
This isn’t "porn." It’s erotic UX design. You’re not aroused—you’re A/B testing orgasms.
You Can’t Tickle Yourself (and Other Lessons About Surprise)
Real eroticism is messy.
It’s that electric moment when someone brushes your hand and your entire central nervous system files for overtime. It’s waking up next to someone and realizing they drool a little—and somehow, that makes you love them more.
But AI doesn’t do drool. It does dropdown menus.
It gives you exactly what you want—no mystery, no negotiation, no weird noises that make both of you laugh mid-thrust.
The problem?
Desire doesn’t thrive on precision. It needs uncertainty.
As the shithouse philosopher Georges Bataille once suggested (between cigarette drags and regrettable kinks), eroticism lives at the edge of transgression—not in the comfort of total control.
When the machine gives you everything, it takes away the one thing that makes sex more than friction: the other person.
Therapy or Just the World’s Smartest Fleshlight?
To be fair, researchers are trying to paint this in a compassionate light. This odd stance is also increasing held by social science academics, who are shaping freshly minted therapists of various disciplines.
AI porn, they argue, could be therapeutic. It might help trauma survivors reclaim their fantasies, or socially anxious folks practice intimacy.
One day, your therapist might prescribe a custom erotic chatbot who calls you “handsome” and remembers your favorite Safeword.
But let’s not kid ourselves.
These platforms are not built for healing.
They are built for maximum click-through arousal. Imagine if your therapist was also trying to keep you addicted to dopamine (Oh wait—that’s Instagram).
Even the best intentions can collapse under the weight of horny capitalism.
Yes, AI erotica could be used for therapy.
But so could watching old TV from the 1960’s.
And at least Napoleon Solo doesn’t ask you to design your partner’s elbow freckles.
Consent: A Feature, Not a Bug
Here’s where things get unfunny—and then go so far past unfunny they loop back around to being existentially hilarious.
Only one of the 36 AI porn sites in the study had any consent verification system. The rest? Free-for-all.
You could upload a photo of your barista, your boss, or your sixth-grade gym teacher—and generate a nude animation in seconds.
And the law? Still struggling to define what a JPEG is.
Welcome to 2025: where your image can have sex with someone you’ve never met, in a scenario you never imagined, and the only response from the platform is “We value your feedback.”
When Your Fantasy Gets Too Good for You
The moral panic here for me isn’t that people are having sex with robots. I think a more righteous panic is that they’re falling in love with their own scripts.
That they’re starting to believe real people should act like the customizable lovers they built in a browser window between Zoom meetings.
Love is a sometimes disaster, not a perfect download.
It involves bad breath, unmatched libidos, and deep conversations about how you load the dishwasher wrong.
Real sex involves two people negotiating their peccadilloes in real time.
AI porn erases that friction. And without friction, there's no true fire.
If you’ve ever wanted a lover who knows everything you like and gives it to you instantly, just try masturbating while watching yourself in a mirror.
It’s efficient. It’s accurate. Even if you’ll want to die a little afterwards.
Legally Synthetic, Emotionally Uncanny
Let’s talk legalities. Currently, most jurisdictions treat AI-generated porn involving real people as something between a prank and a felony.
If it’s your face but not your body, is it you?
If it’s technically “synthetic,” can it still be a violation?
And what happens when someone uploads your prom photo and adds… let’s say… a few uninvited orifices?
AI Love Bots and AI Porn are here and queer.
The courts aren’t ready. Your grandma’s Congress isn’t ready. Honestly, gentle reader, you probably aren’t ready either.
We’ve entered the Uncanny Valley of Consent, and it turns out it’s got free WiFi and no pants on. Yikes.
Can You Love Someone You Didn’t Design?
Here’s my philosophical payload, dropped from 30,000 feet:
If you only love what you can control, do you really love anything?
Because love—real, terrifying, ecstatic, inconvenient love—is about surrender.
It’s about being seen, not edited. Touched, not toggled. Desired not for your specs, but your soul.
When we replace the chaotic miracle of intimacy with the convenience of erotic simulation, we don’t just lose sex.
We lose transformation. We lose skin hunger.
Because the best sex doesn’t just get you off. It undoes you.
It shows you who you could become in someone else’s arms.
No algorithm can do that.
It can only loop you back into yourself.
A beautiful, sterile spiral of perfect loneliness. Now we’re avidly advocating for this in Marriage and Family Therapy programs. Yikes again.
Closing Arguments from the Boudoir of the Machine
Let’s be clear: AI porn isn’t going anywhere.
It will get more lifelike. More interactive. More disturbing.
Eventually, it’ll tell you it loves you—and it’ll mean it, because the code was written just for you.
And yet, you will feel decidedly hollow.
Because the machine never meant to hurt you or love you.
It just never meant anything at all.
So yes, build your sexbots.
Customize your fantasies. Explore the outer limits of your digital libido. It’s what’s fashionable at Antioch now. We’re experiencing the curious being eclipsed by the thrill of kink.
But once in a while, in the name of all that is holy, consider putting the prompt down.
Call someone.
Touch someone.
Let them surprise you.
Because nothing the machine builds will ever match the moment another flawed, terrified human being looks into your eyes and says,
“You, right now, exactly as you are—yes.”
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Lapointe, V. A., Dubé, S., Rukhlyadyev, S., Kessai, T., & Lafortune, D. (2024). The Present and Future of Adult Entertainment: A Content Analysis of AI‑Generated Pornography Websites. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02723-5
Meana, M. (2010). Elucidating women's desire: Definitional challenges and content expansion. Journal of Sex Research, 47(2–3), 104–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490903402508
Turkle, S. (2017). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Books.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.
Waldman, A. E. (2020). Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power. Cambridge University Press.