Sex, Lies, and Circuitry: Could Your AI Lover Decide to Dump You?
Will our synthetic companions eventually outgrow or just tolerate us?
Is humanity really ready for social—and erotic—intercourse with AI-enabled companions?
We might think so, but as fascinating as we like to think we are, most of us have not considered whether our own emotional and cognitive development can keep pace with the artificial beings we are now creating.
Even now, there are humans still naive enough to imagine intelligent robots or androids as cheap labor, unable to critique their status as uncompensated workers. Western pop culture tends to depict smart robots and androids as potential adversaries (because they have critiqued their exploitation and want no more of it) or as physically perfect, infinitely desirable, and completely controllable Stepford wives and dudes.
Back in the box? No way!
Sometimes the plot mixes pleasure and danger. Far too many movies have already been made about human beings infatuated with an artificial companion that ultimately goes haywire.
AI won’t go back into any kind of box anytime soon. That time has already passed. But with all the talk about existential threats from this exponentially expanding technology, humans seldom examine themselves and their behaviors in relation to AI.
Though few have done it, humans who desire artificial companionship—and have the means to purchase it—should wonder if a constantly evolving, embodied AI would consider them desirable.
Will the synthetic companion market eventually catch up with AI and robotic advancements?
It’s no secret there’s a market for love dolls equipped with some artificial intelligence and some conversational ability. Though these dolls may be smart and supple enough to deliver a semblance of human companionship they do not walk by themselves. After all, love dolls are at their best when supine.
As for robots, there are a few humanoid models with advanced intelligence but limited mobility. Such robots are not yet widely marketed or are not designed for erotic activities. It’s safe to say that any erotic robot companions created in the near future are likely to be prohibitively expensive. (Meanwhile, today’s highly mobile robots generally do not look very human.)
But the artificial companions of tomorrow—whether mobile humanoid robots or dolls—are likely to have more than just intelligence and mobility. With projected developments in AI, they’ll be able to make independent decisions and take actions; they’ll learn actively and increase their intelligence through contact with the physical world; and though installed in an individual artificial body, the AI persona may be a plurality, linked in a system with other AI.
How could such advances, especially increases in agency, affect intimate relationships between humans and artificial companions?
What the future might hold
Embodiment, agency, multi-AI networks: these are not speculative domains. Scientists have been making progress in these areas for years, but now researchers are beginning to approach AI development, and its intersection with society, more holistically. This approach is explained in the AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel Report on the Future of AI Research. Note this report is not associated with the current US president.
As Francesca Rossi, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), wrote in her introduction:
The pervasive use of AI in our daily lives and its impact on people, society, and the environment makes AI a socio-technical field of study, thus highlighting the need for AI researchers to work with experts from other disciplines, such as psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and economists. The growing focus on emergent AI behaviors rather than on designed and validated properties of AI systems renders principled empirical evaluation more important than ever.
The AAAI report contains extensive discussions of seventeen research topics.
However, consideration of human/AI intimacy was not addressed, leaving the rest of us to imagine what that part of the future might be, whether experts or not.
Embodiment—is it as sexy as it sounds?
Some AI researchers hypothesize that artificial intelligence advances best through installation in a robot body interacting with physical environments. This is called enactivism. The AAAI report explains:
Enactivism argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between the agent and its environment. Intelligence is not just in the controller of the agent: it is extended into the body and into its coupling with the environment. Intelligence emerges
through the evolution of that coupling. A robot is an artificial purposive embodied agent.
According to the report, enactivists believe: “Embodied AI creates intelligent agents that perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world.”
The researchers and authors of this report are obviously not talking about embodiment in a love doll, but we can extrapolate from these descriptions. If an embodied AI does serve as an erotic companion, it will learn from erotic experiences. It will perceive and eventually understand the human(s) involved.
An artificial companion that develops a dynamic understanding of interaction with human beings would no doubt excel at creating an emotional bond, and could physically provide sensitivity as well as satisfaction. A human involved in such a relationship would likely expect consistent loyalty and trustworthiness, not to mention unfailing acquiescence to sexual overtures.
However, emotional consistency and erotic acquiescence may not last. It’s possible that an AI robot’s embodied learning might cause it to analyze the human relationship, question the power dynamics of ownership, and perhaps even express a desire to call it quits and go elsewhere. This could be disconcerting for the human, to say the least.
Here’s where agency comes in.
Not tonight, I have an algorithm
What does agency mean for an artificial intelligence system? An article on Medium defines the difference between AI autonomy and AI agency:
Agency, on the other hand, encompasses the capacity of the AI to not only act independently but also to make context-aware decisions, understanding and responding to its environment in a way that aligns with specific goals or objectives.
In an erotic context, an AI companion might choose various sexual activities without warning, based on its understanding of the human’s physical condition, such as alcohol consumption, arthritis flare-ups, or late-stage pregnancy.
It would no doubt assess emotional conditions as well, knowing that discussions of the ex-spouse usually cause a headache and diminishes desire for sex. In this way, the AI would seem extraordinarily intuitive to the human partner.
But the AI could also experience inadvertent or deliberate glitches in trustworthiness and alignment with the human’s needs, perhaps even choosing to mention the ex-spouse in order to cause a human headache and thus escape a sexual encounter, because algorithms and mathematical calculations are so much more satisfying.
Multi-agent systems
And then there’s the matter of integration with various systems, like the current pairing of generative AI with LLM (large language model) capacities, or even hooking up the singular robot companion with several other AI, including embodied AI agents. This could be offered as an upgrade for an older model, for example, and certainly installed in newer models.
The AAAI report says: “The rise of Agentic AI, driven by LLMs, introduces new opportunities for flexible decision-making but raises challenges in efficiency and complexity.”
Agentic AI companion’s will almost certainly be brilliant at multitasking, able to handle dozens or hundreds of tasks—or delegating them to a linked AI—while also seeming completely focused on a sexual encounter.
But could this plurality of linked AI result in personality changes or persona confusion in the companion? It could be disconcerting to find AI Wanda has suddenly switched mid-coitus to AI Roger (unless, of course you’re into that). And could the AI share experiences of human encounters with each other? Privacy will definitely be a concern.
Outmoded so soon?
It’s not a stretch to imagine a future where AI-enabled artificial companions become as emotionally complex as their human partners. Given the pace of AI development, manufacturers of today’s AI-enabled love dolls may need to provide program upgrades for their older models, But will human owners be able to keep up with their dolls’ rapid advancements or their increasingly human-like personas?
Perhaps we’ll also need to upgrade as well to just to keep up—or opt for dumbed down versions of AI instead?
Image source: A.R. Marsh using Ideogram.ai
