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.

Interview

Culture

Education

Justice

S&U interviews

17 February 2025

8 min read

How justice shaped a world of rights

Historian John Coffey talks about his contribution to a new book: Justice & Rights.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A statue of a woman holding a spear in one hand a lightening bolt in the others that reads: 'Droits de l'homme'.

A French statute celebrating Human Rights.

DDP on Unsplash.

In our networked world old problems, and new ideas to solve them, flash across our minds and screens. It can be a hectic and dis-orientating feeling that occurs when we try to make sense of it all. Whether it's the global order changing or yet another injustice occurring.

Seeking insights on all this means crossing boundaries, and that’s what over 160 scholars do by sharing with each other. The members of the Global Faculty Initiative (GFI), drawn from all faculties usual in great universities, integrate faith and scholarship through dialogues. They examine the themes of justice, order, flourishing and beauty - mixing subject matter expertise in everything from physics to public policy.

The GFI has just published the results of one such dialogue in a book Justice and Rights. Among the contributors is Professor John Coffey. His work explores the history of religion and the big ideas like justice and rights. Recently he talked with GFI coordinator Bethan Willis, on its Justice podcast series. Here’s an extract of the discussion that looks at the ‘genealogy of rights.’

Bethan Willis So, shifting focus now to the question of rights, particularly. So, you talk in your Brief about the genealogy of rights, and in his Theology Brief, Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a case for placing rights at the centre of our understanding of justice, but that's obviously not an uncontested move. And some people would see a focus on rights as problematic, and part of the debate about the legitimacy or the value of rights can sometimes centre around the question of where rights actually come from. So which period in history, which philosophy and vision of human life and justice gives rise to this language. So can you tell us a little bit about that kind of trajectory that you've set out in your Brief , the different points at which people might identify rights as coming to the fore and why that happens and the various interests at play in these discussions of where rights come from?

John Coffey So it can be very confusing if you read the scholarship on this subject because if you listen to someone like Samuel Moyne, he will argue that the human rights revolution of the 1970s really invents human rights or maybe grudgingly the 1940s and the conservative statesmen who created the UN declaration of human rights in that period. Others, of course, would root it in the enlightenment. And I guess this is a classic answer. It's the enlightenment and the French Revolution with its Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which is really at the heart of the story of rights. But then early modernists and medievalists pushback, they see natural rights language, the idea of individual subjective rights that one has simply on the basis of one's humanity. These are distinct from legal rights, but they're individual natural rights that they would see this concept emerging in the Middle Ages with canon lawyers and Juris and so on, and then being embraced by various 17th, 16th, 17th century groups up to Locke.

And I think there are different things going on here. One, of course, is that there are turf wars between historians in different periods who want to draw attention to their period as being really seminal in various ways. People have talked about the revenge of the medievalists, the early modernists and the Renaissance specialists who made so much emphasis on this being a radical break from the dark mediaeval past that mediaevalists have always been keen to push back against that and to point to the mediaeval roots of a lot of modern concepts. But I think there's also more going on here. I think in some ways it's part of a bigger argument about political and to some extent economic liberalism as well, because rights language has been so important for liberals, whether they're talking about politics or talking about economics. So, you have an example of rival genealogies being used for political purposes, if you like, to both problematize and legitimize, right?

BW Your work is focused on the contributions that religious groups have made to politics and ideas. And you particularly reference the Levellers in the 17th century and the abolitionists at the turn of the 18th, 19th century. Can you tell us a bit about the contribution that Christians may have made to the development of rights and particularly to the rights of freedom of conscious thought and belief in particular?

JC Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to emphasize this because there's also been a long tradition of suspicion of rights language among Christians, especially in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I mean, this has obviously been true in the Catholic church in the 19th century where there was deep suspicion of liberalism and the individualism associated with it and rights language was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by many traditionalist Catholics. But it's also true in Protestant circles as well, among some high Anglicans. But you could see it in the Dutch Calvinist tradition, they founded an anti-revolutionary party after the French Revolution, which is very critical of the political language which emerges from that event. So, it's interesting to see how historians and intellectual historians in recent decades have recovered what you might call the theological origins of rights talk. And that's true of people like Brian Tierney writing about the mediaeval era and showing the kind of seminal influence of various mediaeval theorists of natural law, but also natural rights.

And certainly, when you get to the period I'm most familiar with from the 17th century onwards, groups like the Levellers are not just talking about native rights or legal rights that they have as Freeborn Englishmen. They're also talking about universal natural human rights that individuals have on the basis of their humanity. And it's in that period in the 17th century that people begin really for the first time to talk about freedom of religion as a natural right. I mean, you don't see that in the Middle Ages. It's a development that emerges within particularly radical Protestantism in the 17th century. Though interestingly, it's also tied to the idea of duties. So because we have a duty to worship God according to our conscience, consciences must be left free and the individual must have a natural right to worship God according to their conscience, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to please God if they just follow the dictates of the state or the state church that they wouldn't be able to worship in a way that's pleasing to God. So, it is interesting the way the argument works. It's theistic grounded in a sense, but it applies not just to Christians, it applies to other kinds of religious worship, to Jews, to Muslims, to heathens and so on.

And you can see more widely a theological grounding for rights in figures like Locke. And that's encapsulated, obviously famously in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson drafted in 1776, that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights’. So, this idea that we have certain rights that we cannot transfer over to the state, that we can alienate them over to the state, they're inalienable, and we have a solemn responsibility before God to protect them. So yeah, I mean, it's certainly by the 18th century, this rights language is absolutely flourishing within Protestant circles, and you can see it being taken up quite significantly in the abolitionist movement in the 1780s, though people are also shying away from it in the 1790s because of the French Revolution and Tom Payne's rights of man and so on. But if you read 19th century American religious abolitionists, people like Frederick Douglas or William Lloyd Garrison or others, they're using the language of natural rights, pretty insistently.

BC And it's often to articulate the kind of victim's perspective, isn't it, to defend the weak against the mighty and to say there's a bigger kind of justice that is beyond the state or the law. Is that right? Can you tell us a bit about how that works?

JC Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right, and it's one reason why we should be wary about just tossing, tossing rights language out as some kind of secular poisoning of the, well, a, it does have some deep roots in Christian thought, but it also, rights language is also designed as one of the weapons of the weak, if you like. It's a way to defend those whose claims are often ignored and to assert their human dignity. So, it's why it gets taken up so much by religious minorities, by those who are pushing for widening the vote and suffrage maybe to all men, maybe eventually to women. The anti-slavery movement is using it, and of course, by the 20th century, the Civil Rights movement.

BC But as you said, Wilberforce himself doesn't really use this language much, partly because the arenas he's speaking in and partly because of these associations with the French Revolution. Is that right?

JC Yeah, and if you look in the 1790s, it's interesting because it's from that period really the language of left and right starts to emerge, and those on the right are very much concerned about law and order. They look across at France and they see disorder and the guillotine and regicide and Civil War and the exile of Catholic priests and so on, and it's extremely alarming for them. So, the emphasis very much shown law and order, and they become extremely alarmed by the way that rights language has been used to undermine order. So, it's classically articulated at that divide between Edmund Burke on the one side and Tom Payne on the other. What's interesting in the British context, is you'll find sort of devout Protestant Christians on both sides of that. So, Wilberforce would be very much on Burke's side in this argument, but the founder of the London corresponding society in the 1790s, a man called Thomas Hardy, he's actually a devout Scottish Calvinist, and he's absolutely on board with this rights language. And so different religious groups will be divided over this.

Follow the rest of John and Bethan's conversation on the GFI podcast.

John Coffey on Justice.