Essay

Culture

21 February 2024

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.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.