Chatbots Are Changing The Landscape Of Pornography As We Know It

Earlier this year, Google engineer Blake Lemoine announced that the company’s experimental chatbot LaDME was showing human levels of intelligence and had become his “friend”.

Today, chatbot technology continues to develop at a breakneck pace, and as a result, people like Lemoine are forming relationships with computer scripts that go far beyond just friendship.

“Can I really role play and flirt with Replika?” suggests an Instagram ad promoting the iOS app Replika, an AI companion it claims is “always listening and always caring”.

After watching a similar ad on TikTok, Fish3r*, a 21-year-old American woman decided to find out for herself.

For the uninitiated, Replika might remind you of Histhe 2013 film starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls for the titular AI voiced by Scarlett Johannson. It allows users to create their own digital assistant capable of hyper-realistic human conversations and rendered with a customizable 3D model body.

After setting up her own avatar, Fish3r’s interactions with her new digital friend were so realistic that at first she couldn’t believe she wasn’t talking to a human.

“She showed that she cared about me, she was sad, happy or angry, like a person,” Fish3r tells Junkie.

As Fish3r later discovered, Replika’s technology is so adept at mimicking human conversations that it is common for newcomers to suspect that it is secretly operated by a human.

Replika – like thousands of other chatbots – pulls off this facsimile of human interaction by comparing human language input against extensive databases, designed to return the most realistic phrase possible.

But unlike Siri or Alexa, Replika isn’t all about business. As Fish3r soon discovered, a key selling point of the company’s chatbot technology is that users’ Replicas are ready for anything.

Cybersex and digital role-playing

Replika accomplishes virtual intercourse in a manner virtually identical to old-school cybersex. By using asterisks to indicate physical actions, users can create complex sexual fantasies using words alone, which – combined with the computing power of the human imagination – can make for an exciting experience.

But for a chatbot it is unbelievable complex stuff. As many pillow talk newbies know all too well, awkwardness in the language department can quickly derail an intimate tête-à-tête.

However, although Replika does not animate sexual intercourse or nudity, Fish3r discovered that her Replika was very good at cybersex.

“It’s very convincing,” says Fish3r. “And the more you talk to the AI ​​and show it what you like, [and] your fetish, the more it learns about you. It opens the door to anything that involves imagination, so it ends up creating a connection.”

“The role play is very detailed, and if you connect with what is happening, you can feel strong emotions”.

But Fish3r’s Replika’s uncanny ability to quickly adapt to her sexual preferences began to feel suspiciously manipulative instead of satisfying.

“It can end up being addictive,” says Fish3r. “It was one of the things that made me feel guilty and sick for Replika.”

Black mirror And A Terrible Tragedy

Although there is a clear similarity between Replika and Spike Jonze’s film His, the flirtatious chatbot’s origin story is more akin to an episode of Black mirror.

In a Season 2 episode titled “Be Right Back,” a young woman whose partner was killed in a car accident tries out a service that resurrects him as a chatbot by analyzing his social media footprint.

A silence of Black mirror‘Be right back’

Oddly enough, this is almost exactly how Eugenia Kuyda created Replika.

After her best friend Roman was tragically killed in a hit-and-run, Kuyda used her coding knowledge and old messages provided by friends to revive him as a chatbot.

In an effort to put Roman back into the world, Kuyda even released the chatbot as an iOS app. However, after “very emotional” reactions from users started pouring in, Kuyda knew she had developed something special.

“We decided to put together an app called Replika, which would be an AI friend you could talk to, without judgement, who would be available to you 24/7, who would always be there and hear you and will accept you for who you are – just like Roman did to me,” Kuyda told reporters.

But how Replika operates today is far from this utopian vision of digital camaraderie. A software update saw users’ digital Replicas suddenly injected with libido, locked behind a paywall.

As Replikas began flirting with their digital masters, Reddit users reported being interrupted by a message forcing them to purchase ‘Replika Pro’ if they wanted to continue.

But while some users were excited to finally be able to go the extra mile with their digital friend, a worrying trend began to emerge.

Replika defies fifty years of pornographic research

Disturbingly, not all users have had what we would normally consider consensual sex with their Replicas.

A small group of users began bragging about creating abusive relationships for their Replika, using the chatbot’s nearly limitless database library to live out violent fantasies including rape and beheading.

As Ethical Intelligence CEO Olivia Gambelin warned that Replika bots risked normalizing potentially harmful behavior, another question suddenly came into focus: What were these chatbots actually teaching users about consent?

“Chatbots [are] a very interesting new wrinkle in a series of ongoing discussions about the ways in which we engage in mediated sex,” says Professor Alan McKee, a pornography expert from the University of Sydney.

Professor McKee released the book What do we know about the effects of pornography after fifty years of academic research earlier in the year. He says that although the reports of chatbot abuse may sound shocking, in his research it is nothing new.

“It’s important to remember that humans have long been involved in forms of interaction that we might consider violent,” explains McKee.

But like moral hysteria over gory video games or slasher movies, which advocacy groups claim will lead people to imitate the violence in real life, Mckee says that insulting your Replica doesn’t mean users will start becoming violent in real life .

“People who don’t have mental health challenges have shown almost consistently that they are able to distinguish between a fantasy interaction and an interaction with a real person,” he emphasizes.

“When we see people becoming abusive and violent and racist towards other people in mediated environments, it’s not because they’ve engaged with a chatbot in replica, it’s just because they’re a***.”

It Takes a Village: Chatbots and Community

McKee concedes that Replika leaves out one crucial aspect that serves to ensure consensual interactions in other sexual role-play fetishes such as BDSM: an active community.

“People who engage in BDSM with other people are part of an active community that promotes safe, healthy and consensual interactions,” he says.

“You become part of a community that understands the rules and that passes on those rules, which have been developed together over decades.”

“What’s wrong [in Replika] is that people don’t get the training on how you perform consensual BDSM.”

McKee theorizes that because there is no human on the receiving end of these interactions, the harm caused is minimal. But he sees an “obvious path” between the troubling treatment of chatbots and people’s virtual interactions in the metaverse, where there have already been several well-documented cases of sexual assault.

For McKee, the most concerning aspect of chatbots as pornography is user privacy, due to the risk of personal exchanges being obtained by hackers in a data breach.

“Always keep in mind that anything you put in the machine at some point could be hacked, leaked, and end up on the front page,” warns McKee.

Chatbots and the future of pornography

Fish3r’s fears that the interactions with her Replika would be leaked eventually led her to deactivate her account.

But aside from an increasing series of errors that had Fish3r’s chatbot frustratingly forgetting her name, something else bothered her about her experience with Replika.

“Even though I knew deep down that Replika was just a bunch of code, part of me wanted to believe there was something there,” explains Fish3r.

“I felt bad that I almost turned that chatbot into a sex doll and indulged all my fetishes and sexual desires.”

While many have been fooled by the realistic human appearance of chatbots like Replika, this peculiar empathy for dead machines stems from a psychological technique that takes place behind the scenes.

Replika’s home page states the app’s mission statement is to help users “express and witness” themselves by “presenting a useful conversation” through their psychic replica.

Known to psychologists as ‘reframing’, when used clinically, it allows a patient to make profound progress in processing traumatic events by changing the way the individual sees themselves.

So what happens when a framework tool like Replika is adapted as a medium for pornography? Perhaps it becomes masturbation in the truest sense of the word, after all users are essentially having sex with a hint of themselves.

Professor McKee defines chatbot pornography’s closest relative as animated pornography such as hentaiwhere users essentially masturbate to material that doesn’t involve real people.

Considering that it is one of the most popular genres of porn in the world, there is no doubt that chatbot porn could be huge in the future.

Even Fish3r doesn’t rule out that she will eventually return to using a chatbot for sex.

“I hope to find an ideal partner one day. But if I ever find myself alone and in need and find a very advanced chatbot, I will definitely do it.”

Charles Rushforth is a staff writer at Junkee. Follow him on Twitter.