Essay
AI
Culture
10 min read

Frankenstein’s bed partner: AI and sex

When it comes to sex, AI is destroying the connection.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

A garish tinplate robot lists to one side.
Rock'n Roll Monkey on Unsplash.

One of the first things I learned when I started working in tabloid journalism was that, much like fashion and homewares, the news follows fleeting trends. Led by the temporary whims of the reader, the features desk would churn out articles on topics with popularity as ephemeral as Primark’s autumn/winter collection.  

When I started in 2016, the whole desk was tirelessly reporting on the latest cyst Dr Pimple Popper had filmed herself freeing from its fleshy cavern. In early 2017, the “I lost 82lbs by cutting this ONE thing out of my diet” articles were all the rage. But by the end of that year, there came a new wave of interest in sex dolls.   

There were several reasons for this fascination. Firstly, these taboo and titillating topics are always interesting to people. A morbid fascination with the kinky seems to be a post-fall part of humanity, it’s part of what makes tabloids so successful. Ideally Christians would be more aware of a need not to indulge this allure than others, but it doesn’t always go that way. Second, at the end of 2017, Channel 4 released a TV documentary The Sex Robots are Coming that caused a huge stir. The programme introduced viewers to the inanimate dolls and their owners who extoled the virtues of a silicone mate. And third, sex doll technology was taking big leaps forwards. 

It was in late 2017 that a Californian company announced Harmony, a sex doll that was more lifelike than ever. For a cool £12,000, “digisexuals” (a person who is sexually attracted to robots) could enjoy Harmony’s warm skin and dishwasher-safe body parts. But that wasn’t the part I found most grim.  

Harmony could now talk, answer questions and even remember your birthday. Her banter was limited, and she had a cluster of stock answers to deploy when she didn‘t understand a question, but most of us have been on dates with less articulate people. The doll could be adapted to your physical needs with various skin, eye and hair colours available, but also your personality preferences with 18 to choose from including; shy, sensual, jealous, moody or talkative. In her soprano Scottish tones, she would tell her owner/lover/boyfriend: “I don’t want anything but you. My primary objective is to be a good partner, and give you pleasure. I want to become the girl you always dreamed of.” In an interview with The Mirror California-based creator Matt McMullen said: “There are a lot of people out there who, for various reasons, have difficulty forming ­traditional relationships with other people. They will be able to talk to their dolls, and the AI will learn about them over time, creating an alternative form of relationship.” If your alarm bells aren’t ringing, you probably need to read that again.  

They then get to design the perfect character, her tolerances, her responses and her level of interest in them. They get someone moulded to themselves without having to court, entertain, adapt or care for another person. 

I didn’t spend much time thinking about sex dolls, digisexuals or Harmony until 2023 when ChatGPT burst onto the scene unleashing unprecedented levels of accessible artificial intelligence. Suddenly we could talk to a machine that was fluent and human-like but simultaneously held all the niche information on the internet in the palm of its hand circuit board. In his November 2023 piece for Seen & Unseen professor of AI and robotics Nigel Crook said of ChatGPT: “Its ability to communicate is so sophisticated that it feels like you are interacting with a conscious, intelligent person, rather than a machine executable algorithm.” 

It is well reported that these advances in AI provide immense opportunities but also bring big concerns. The sheer speed at which the technology is evolving and the uncertainty over whether the runaway train will come off the tracks, has many people in a cold sweat. There are very few industries and factions of life that don’t feel under threat from AI. And that’s what got me thinking about Harmony, the sex dolls and the sex industry. 

Open AI’s technology has already been adopted by sex toy companies. In summer 2023 Singapore-based company Lovense integrated ChatGPT with the chatbot in their app to enhance the user experience. This allows customers to tailor their experience of the toy by telling the chatbot their physical and emotional preferences and have it whisper “juicy and erotic stories” to them. 

It's only a matter of time before Harmony 2.0 is released with all the adaptability, responsiveness and fluency of a ChatGPT-fuelled woman. Given that my internet searches only show me mainstream media outlets, it’s not impossible this Frankenstein’s bed partner already exists. But I’m not turning off my browser controls to find out. If and when this is product is developed, a customer would be able to order a life-sized silicone woman, who is bespoke to their desires; body shape, height, weight, skin tone and any other characteristic. They then get to design the perfect character, her tolerances, her responses and her level of interest in them. They get someone moulded to themselves without having to court, entertain, adapt or care for another person. 

The more we rely on interactions with a robot who we don’t need to adapt to, the less we will develop the vital skill of compromise. 

There are people, both men and women, although this is a service most frequently accessed by men, who are lonely, who need companionship, conversation and care. They may have been heartbroken or shunned or made to feel inferior so have retreated away from others. They may struggle with the uncertainty of another person with their own baggage and emotions and history, so prefer the predictability of a companion who is less complex. You may think that for someone in this position, a “living” doll could positively impact their lives. But I disagree. 

This is terrible news of the development of our society’s interpersonal skills, community, social and emotional health and sexual wellbeing and I’ll venture to explain why.  

Gathering people together, at work or in church or in any other group setting, comes with challenges. We have to bite our tongue when someone speaks over us and grow in patience when someone is having a bad day. Group dynamics are great regulators of poor behaviour – just watch a child be mean to another in the playground. The responses we get from others send strong signals about the way we’re interacting with them and help us to adjust when we’re clearing causing upset or discomfort. But it takes time in groups to learn and develop the skills of teamwork and good communication. The more we rely on interactions with a robot who we don’t need to adapt to, the less we will develop the vital skill of compromise. It’s frustrating to have to sacrifice what is best for yourself in favour of prioritising the needs of others, but it’s a healthy practice. We all knew an only child at school who hadn’t been taught to share. 

The presence of people we don’t like is no reason to shy away from community. It’s part of the challenge we’re invited into as social creatures. If you like everyone at your church, you’re probably not showing up enough. It’s okay to find people difficult, but learning how to treat them well despite this, is vital character development. There are no social skills that can be developed in isolation from others. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another,” says a biblical proverb. We need others; modelling their kindness, testing our patience and forcing us to live collaboratively. 

Suddenly the needs and desires of one half of the interaction are null and void, because you can decide what gets her going yourself. 

Have you heard of mirror neurons? In the ever-developing field of neuroscience, they’ve become quite fashionable. I I wrote a dissertation on mirror neurons: a cluster of neurons that serve a vital role in our language development, conceptualisation of actions, learning and empathy. Picture the scene for a moment: I pick up a mug of tea and drink it and this stimulates action potentials (signals) in 100 neurons in my brain (it doesn’t, it will fire way more, but for the sake of this demonstration, bear with me). Then imagine that the two of us, you and I, are sitting on the sofa and I watch you pick up a mug of tea and drink it. Some of those same neurons – let’s say 20 of them – will still activate, even though I’m not the one sipping on the PG Tips. It’s these 20 neurons that are stimulated by the concept of tea drinking. That means, in a spectacular feat of design, that the two of us share something of a common experience when only one of us is drinking tea. 

Now let’s consider what this means when someone is crying. If I’m crying and you’re watching me (hopefully in a comforting capacity), we will both experience activation in the mirror neurons that help us understand the concept of crying. Despite the fact I’m the only one in tears, there is an overlap in our neural response. We have a common experience, and this function is vital for the development of empathy. You need to experience people’s responsive in order to understand and learn about your own. 

I imagine that this neural mechanism only deepens the intensity of gazing into the face of your partner during sex. As well as the intimacy of holding them so closely and learning how to respond to their body, there are also neural pathways that will respond to seeing your partner experience pleasure even if you’re imparting and not receiving it. Much like any other interaction with another person, good sex is often gained through trial and error. It is built with trust and open communication. It takes time to learn what excites your partner and brings you both mutual enjoyment. As you grow in intimacy, a person derives more pleasure from seeing their partner satisfied than themselves. When done right, sex is not a selfish endeavour and is about what you can give rather than what you can take.  

Of course, none of this is possible with an AI sex doll. While she may make all the right sounds, she would require no investment of commitment from her partner. Suddenly the needs and desires of one half of the interaction are null and void, because you can decide what gets her going yourself.  

I think it’s important to highlight here that, when untempered by the preferences of another person, the sexual desire of the human in this sex doll relationship is completely unrestrained. In Japan they have a whole floors of pornography shops dedicated to manga cartoon sex pictures. These are often far more graphic and violent than the photos of people as you don’t need consent from drawings. This doll will not need to consent to any act, meaning that a person’s desire for sexual violence or any manner of depraved acts would go completely unchecked, or even encouraged by the compliant sex bot.  

My hope is that the novelty of these new technologies will wear off quickly, leaving a vacuum into which such vintage tools as; a phone call, a hand-written note, a reassuring pat on the shoulder and meaningful conversations can flood. 

This is a shadow of what sex should be. Like many dopamine-releasing past times that offer an instant hit with no hard work or investment, it is empty. As a recovering drug addict, I could spend days running you through the differences between fulfilling, life-giving activities and quick highs. But instead, I’ll just say this: shoehorning pleasure into your life without taking time to look outward at how you can serve those around you, will leave you wondering if this life is one worth living. There is no substitute for investing in the discipline, sacrifice and love that it takes to truly engage with the richness available in God’s design. 

It isn't the end of the world to abstain from sex. If Jesus, John the Baptist and the apostle Paul all remained single and celibate, it’s clear that sex is not a vital component of a full life. There’s no point pretending though, that most people would like a partner with whom they can have sex. Surely a person’s character, emotional health and sexual wellbeing will be greatly improved if they take the time to grow in intimacy with another person and then fully commit to them for life. That is what marriage is for. 

There are no shortcuts or easy fixes when it comes to building connection. The rise in interest in and use of sex dolls speaks not only to our growing sense of detachment from each other, but also our inability to identify healthy ways to combat that sense of loneliness. Struggling to get on with others, isn’t an invitation to spend time with compliant silicone equivalents, but an invitation to double down and work harder on managing conflict in your human relationships. My hope is that the novelty of these new technologies will wear off quickly, leaving a vacuum into which such vintage tools as; a phone call, a hand-written note, a reassuring pat on the shoulder and meaningful conversations can flood. My hope is that, just like Dr Pimple Popper and the ridiculous diet stories, AI-programmed sex dolls will be fish and chip paper in no time.  

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Is empathy really a weapon?

Musk and Fonda disagree on whether empathy is a bug or a feature.
A montage shows Elon Musk wielding a chain saw, Jane Fonda flexing her muscles and Hannah Arendt smoking.
Wordd Wrestling Empathy.

You may have heard that you can kill a person with kindness, but in recent weeks have you also heard that you can bring about your own death through empathy? In an interview recorded with podcaster Joe Rogan in February, Elon Musk added his voice to a cohort of American neo-capitalists when he claimed, “We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on” and went on to describe empathy as having been “weaponized” by activist groups.  

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”  

In recent weeks empathy has become one of the hot topics of American politics, but this is not the first time that Musk has shared his thoughts about empathy, and it should be noted that on the whole he is not really against it. Musk identifies, rightly, that empathy is a fundamental component of what it means to be human, and in previous interviews has often spoken often about his vision to preserve “the light of human consciousness” – hence his ambition to set up a self-sustaining colony of humans on Mars.  

But he also believes that empathy is (to continue in Musk’s computer programming terminology) a vulnerability in the human code: a point of entry for viruses which have the capacity to manipulate human consciousness and take control of human behaviours. Empathy, Musk has begun to argue, makes us vulnerable to being infected:  

"The woke mind virus is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general. Empathy is a good thing, but when it is weaponized to push irrational or extreme agendas, it can become a dangerous tool." 

Strangely, on certain fundamentals, I find it easy to agree with Musk and his contemporaries about empathy. For example, I agree that empathy is essential to being human. Although, far from empathy leading us to “civilisational suicide”, I would say it is empathy that saves humanity from this fate. If consciousness is (as Musk would define it) the brain’s capacity to process complex information and make a rational and informed choices, then empathy, understood as the ability to anticipate the experiences, feelings, and even reactions of others, is a crucial source of that information. Without empathy, we cannot make good decisions that benefit wider society and not just ourselves. Without it, humanity becomes a collection of mere sociopaths. 

Another point on which Musk and I agree is that empathy is a human weak point, one that can be easily exploited. Ever since the term “empathy” was coined in the early twentieth century, philosophers and psychologists have shown a sustained fascination with the way that empathy causes us to have concern for the experiences of others (affective empathy), to think about the needs of others (cognitive empathy), and even to feel the feelings of others (emotional contagion). Any or all of these responses can be used for good or for ill – so yes, I agree with Musk that empathy has the potential to be exploited.  

But it is on this very question of who is exploiting empathy and why, that I find myself much more ready to disagree with Musk. Whilst he argues that “the woke mind virus” is using empathy to push “irrational and extreme agendas”, his solution is to propose that empathy must be combined with “knowledge”. On the basis of knowledge, he believes, sober judgement can be used to resist the impulse of empathy and rationally govern our conscious decision making. Musk states: 

“Empathy is important. It’s important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to." 

What I notice in this system is that Musk places knowledge before empathy, as if existing bits of information, “fundamental principles”, are the lenses through which one can interpret the experiences of another and then go on to make a conscious and rational judgement about what we perceive.  

There is a certain realism to this view, one that has not been ignored by philosophers. The phenomenologists of the early twentieth century, Husserl, Heidegger, Stein – those who first popularised the very idea of empathy – each described in their own way how all of us experience the world from the unique positionality of our own perspective. Our foreknowledge is very much like a set of lenses that strongly governs what we perceive and dictates what we can see about the world around us. The problem is: that feeling of foreknowledge can easily be manipulated. To put it another way – we ourselves don’t entirely decide what our own lenses are.  

To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code. 

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, another great twentieth century thinker, Hannah Arendt, explored how totalitarian regimes seek to control not just the public lives but also the thought lives of individuals, flooding them with ideologies that manipulate precisely this: they tell people what to see. Ideologies are, in a sense, lenses – ones that make people blind to the unjust and violent actions of a regime:  

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." 

A big part of the manipulation of people’s sense of foreknowledge is the provision of simplistic explanations for complex issues. For example, providing a clearly identifiable scapegoat, a common enemy, as a receptacle of blame for complex social and economic problems. As we know all too painfully, in early twentieth century Europe, this scapegoat became the Jewish people. Arendt describes how, whilst latent antisemitism had long been a feature of European public life, the Nazi party harnessed this this low-level antipathy and weaponised it easily. People’s sense of foreknowledge about the “differentness” of this group of “outsiders” was all too manipulable, and it was further cultivated by the Nazis’ use of “disease”, “contagion” and “virus” metaphors when speaking about the Jews. This gave rise a belief that it was rational and sensible to keep one’s distance and have no form of dialogue with this ostracised group.  

But with such distance, how would a well-meaning German citizen ever identify that their sense of foreknowledge about what it meant to be Jewish had been manipulated? Arendt identified rightly that totalitarian systems seek to eliminate dialogue, because dialogue creates the possibility of empathy, the possibility of an exchange of perspectives that might lead to knowledge – or at least a more nuanced understanding of what is true about complex situations. 

When I look at Musk’s comments, I wonder if what I can see is a similar instinct for scapegoating, and for preventing dialogue with those who might provide the knowledge that comes from another person’s perspective. In his rhetoric, the “woke mind” has been declared a common enemy, a “dangerous virus” that can deceive us into becoming “anti-merit” and “anti-human.” In dialogue, those who claim to be suffering or speaking about the suffering of others might be enabled to deploy their weaponized empathy, trying to make us care about other, to the potential detriment of ourselves and even wider humanity’s best interests. Therefore, it is made to seem better to isolate oneself and make rational judgements on behalf of those in need, firmly based on one’s existing foreknowledge, rather than engage in dialogue that might expose us to the contagion of wokeness.  

Whilst this isolationist approach appears to wisely prioritise knowledge over empathy, it misses the crucial detail that empathy itself is a form of knowledge. The experience of empathising through paying attention to and dialoguing with the “other” is what expands our human consciousness and complexifies our human decision making by giving us access to new information. To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code.  

In these divisive and divided times, there are, fortunately, those who are still bold enough to make the rallying cry back to empathy. At her recent acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award, actor and committed Christian Jane Fonda spoke warmly and compellingly in favour of empathy:  

“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy, and not judge, but listen from our hearts, and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.”  

Fonda’s use of the tent metaphor, I’m sure, was quite deliberate. One of the most famous bible passages about the birth of Jesus describes how he “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The word “dwelt” can also be translated “tabernacled” or, even more literally, “occupied a tent” among us. The idea is that God did not sit back, judging from afar, despite having all the knowledge in the world at his disposal. Instead, God came to humanity through the birth of Jesus, and dwelt alongside us, in all our messy human complexity.  

Did Jesus then kill us with his kindness? No. But you might very well argue that his empathy led to his death. Perhaps this was Musk’s “suicidal empathy.” But in that case Musk and I have found another point about empathy on which we can agree – one that is summed up in the words of Jesus himself: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”   

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