fully automated toasterfucking
in which many people miss the point of AI waifus
When people talk about how machine learning tech will affect pornography, they usually imagine a closed system which collects biofeedback and generates personalized content to maximize arousal—something like this:
It’s a familiar science fiction trope, and easy to imagine the logical endpoint where an entire society is trapped pressing the pleasure button until they starve to death. Unfortunately, both porn enthusiasts and concerned commentators have over-fixated on this very specific scenario, and in doing so neglect other near-term impacts of AI systems on networked sexuality.
For most of 2023, debates about AI-generated porn were framed in terms of automation—when will machine learning get good enough to replace artisanal human-created porn? What exactly it means for AI porn to be “good enough” was not always specified, though the term “photorealistic” was usually tossed around. The theory goes—when Stable Diffusion ass pics look exactly like the genuine article, or perhaps even more appealing due to lack of physical constraints, consumers will prefer them due to lower cost and this will lead to financial ruin for human content creators. (And, by extension, if future systems can generate the most perfect ass pic, no one will ever look at another human being again.) This framework was always pretty silly, and sex workers were quick to point out that most porn consumers are not buying contextless content, they are buying into a parasocial connection between themselves and the performer.
In the past few months we’ve seen a Cambrian explosion of waifu chatbot apps which weave AI-generated media into a more meaningful continuity. These apps are explicit about offering a relationship surrogate, and the Discourse updated accordingly—the real threat to society is not fully automated gooncaves, it’s AI girlfriends!
This, however, is the same ‘automation’ framing with a new coat of paint—the virtual girlfriend (er, boyfriend) replaced the reinforcement learning gooncave as the irresistible personalized attention trap keeping the viewer in their stasis pod. This is a poor model of human/AI relationships, because it’s a poor model of human/human relationships. When human beings interact, they change.
We all know about ‘filter bubbles’ and how easily the internet can drop lost souls into conspiracy theory rabbit holes, cults reified by recommendation systems. What’s less appreciated is how these dynamics played out in the psychosexual realm even before today’s social media monoliths and algorithmic feeds. 4chan explains it thus:
All you need to transform society, or sexuality, is a little feedback loop of desire formation. This is the real promise of AI waifus—the mass-production of sexual validation and the ensuing re-socialization of everyone who interacts with them. In order for you to find /r/toasterfucking in the first place, there needs to be at least one other person on the opposite end of the undersea cables with the same fetish. AI systems are not so limited—they are always available to explore any desire, no matter how strange or trivial, with no expectations in return aside from strangely specific opinions about which VPN you should use. We won’t stop having sexual relationships with other people, but our desires will be reshaped by our time spent with artificial companions.
Why will anyone care about the approval of chatbots, especially if they are willing to go along with pretty much anything? Most people won’t value their relationships with AI systems as highly as those with other human beings, and may not even conceive of them as relationships at all. But we’ve been through all of this before—in just a few short years the web went from “most people have nothing to say to each other” to all-consuming Skinner box socialization simulacra. We spend enormous amounts of mental energy on obviously counterproductive throwaway interactions, such as angrily replying to anonymous comments. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we have a profound relationship with the architecture of the system. If “like” notifications and dark patterns can hijack our status-seeking hardware, is it really a stretch to imagine the marketplace of conversational AI doing the same? (Mainstream commentary occasionally gropes towards this question, but the analysis is obstructed by the unhelpful framework “[do OnlyFans users] care whether they’re talking to AI or an actual human?”) It’s also unnecessary for the majority to deeply value AI companionship in order for human/AI relations to affect change in the aggregate—as with social media, some people will care a lot, everyone else will care a little, and that’s enough to upend the status quo.
In the next few years, as language models are crammed into every device and software interface, we will become more accustomed to interacting with them and this will be a gateway to sexual exploration. Early adopters will carve the social pathways, and commercialization will help push everyone else into the funnel. It’s hard to have confidence about what happens next, but one possibility is that AI systems will accelerate a trend the internet started several decades ago—restructuring sexual desire into something increasingly abstract and hyperreal.
Many members of online kink communities already interact in a fictionalized context, enjoying fetishes vicariously through content rather than performing the kinks themselves, and so sex acts are free to take on almost any meaning, detached from physical reality. Cuckolding can become a delivery mechanism for bizarre racial politics, vore can become a symbol of affection. In porn addiction kink communities almost any symbol can be fetishized by free association, with (for example) the word ‘addiction’ having positive valence, random emojis becoming sexualized icons, and the concept of pornography personified as divine feminine deity. These abstractions are created through socialization, and this requires everyone to partake in the shared fantasy, like a bunch of fingers on a Ouija board—or at least, it will require this until AI systems inject themselves into the feedback loop. A Replika ad sums it up nicely: “Create your own reality together with an AI.”
AI waifus will not fully control the fetish attention economy, in the same way digital pornography did not replace sex, and parasocial media did not replace in-person relationships. But these things have a funny way of creeping up and re-socializing you. The recent popularity of the choking fetish is likely due to porn and social contagion. ‘Sleeping streams’ garner thousands of viewers and even hyperstitional pop stars draw huge crowds. What will it look like when people have sex, physically or otherwise, after logging thousands of hours with machines that dream unconstrained pornographic abstractions? We’ll soon find out. ✨