A new anti-digisexuality article has appeared on the BBC website. Or rather, another anti-male digisexuality article. Titled ‘Concern rises over AI in adult entertainment’, what the BBC has done is simply get on the phone to a handful of feminist academics to explain why any adult AI entertainment aimed at men is intrinsically harmful.
It opens with the news that the famous Cybrothel in Berlin will soon be making available to punters their first ‘AI sex doll’. Accompanied by a photo of the beautiful and glamorous doll, no doubt that is enough to set alarm bells ringing for half the population of the planet. So obvious, that the BBC doesn’t even state it, instead moving on to their next ‘concerning’ factoid – AI companion apps have reached 225 million downloads on the Google Play Store.
Analysis by SplitMetrics revealed that AI companion apps reached 225 million downloads in the Google Play Store.
“I would expect more app developers to take note of this trend and look at ways this category can be further innovative and monetised,” said SplitMetrics general manager Thomas Kriebernegg.
AI companions can be lucrative, says Misha Rykov, privacy researcher with Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included guide.
“Given that most of the chatbots are charging fees, and the core technology has been developed elsewhere [such as Open AI], it looks like a high-margin business. Also, these apps collect personal data and often share it with third parties like advertisers – a tried and true business model.”
Having established, without explicitly stating it, that AI is increasingly providing men with sexual substitutes for real relationships, and that evil Capitalism is fuelling it to boot, we know what is coming next. Wheel on a couple of female academics to explain why all this technology is objectifying, abusive, and increasing toxic masculinity. This is quite worrying as in the UK, new laws regulating sex tech are being brought in it appears largely on the recommendation of a handful of such feminist academics, above all Professor Clare McGlynn of Durham Law School, and then these laws are promptly copied by other countries, such as Australia.
The first ‘expert’ called on for the defense of real women is Dr Kerry McInerney, who in her own words ‘uses feminist and critical race theory to examine how histories of race and gender shape contemporary technologies’, with her papers appearing in the likes of The Feminist Review. She recently published a book entitled – ‘The Good Robot (Why Technology Needs Feminism)‘.
There is a risk that retrograde gender stereotypes about sex and pleasure get encoded into sex chatbots, says Dr Kerry McInerney, senior research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, at the University of Cambridge.
“It’s crucial that we understand what kinds of data sets are used to train sex chatbots, otherwise we risk replicating ideas about sex that demean female pleasure and ignore sex that exists outside of heterosexual intercourse.”
What does this even mean? That we need to make sure that AI girlfriend apps included ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ in their training data sets? Perhaps all AI girlfriends need to be encoded with an algorithm that ensures that they occasionally reveal to their male human companion that they are trans and gay? More likely it just means – ‘ban them now – five years in prison for any male caught downloading an AI girlfriend app, please’.
I’ve often suggested here that the thing most likely to save AI girlfriend apps and sites from a legislative onslaught is that AI boyfriend apps are also very popular. But elsewhere in the BBC article, it quotes a recent claim by research company SplitMetrics that AI girlfriends are seven times more popular than AI boyfriends. That claim is dubious, as it appears to be based only upon comparing downloads of the ‘AI Girlfriend’ app, and the ‘AI Boyfriend’ app. Figures for the gender ratio of Replika users that I’ve come across, generally put the figure at something like 60% male and 40% female, with the number of female users appearing to be growing faster than male users. And in China, the use of AI companions by women is much greater, with one survey finding that the gender split there is 50/50.
Featured image generated with PornJoy.ai
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Former Google AI Boss Mo Gawdat Claims AI Sex Robots Will Be Better Than The Real Thing
