neo-stimmies arrive from the future

gooning, sextbots, reddit, and you

The story goes like this:

[Beer bottles] lie in the sun, shiny and brown, reflecting light from the ring of dimpled glass near the bottom (a design intended to help humans maintain their grip on the bottled beverage). To the male Julodimorpha bakewelli beetle, a beer bottle lying on the ground looks like the biggest, most beautiful female he has ever seen.

He doesn't waste any time when he sees her. The male immediately mounts the object of his affection, with his genitalia everted and ready for action. Nothing will dissuade him from his lovemaking, not even the opportunistic Iridomyrmex discors ants that will consume him bit by bit as he tries to impregnate the beer bottle. Should an actual Julodimorpha bakewelli female wander by, he will ignore her, remaining faithful to his true love, the stubby lying in the sun. If the ants don't kill him, he will eventually dry up in the sun, still trying his hardest to please his partner.

The beer bottle is a supernormal stimulus, an artifact which didn’t exist in the beetle’s ancestral environment and which hijacks its natural instincts to elicit an extremely potent response. The concept was first popularized by Konrad Lorenz’s research on fixed action patterns, where ethologists placed volleyballs in front of geese to trigger their egg-retrieval instincts. In the years that followed, psychologists expanded the category of supernormal stimuli (or “superstimuli,” which we all agree sounds cooler) to include human phenomena—junk food, television, video games, drugs, social media, and, of course, pornography. It’s a tantalizing mental model because it neatly explains our akratic relationship with technology. Why did I eat that entire box of Oreos? Superstimulus! Why am I still goonscrolling? Superstimulus!

If you’ve spent any time on Hypnotube or PMVHaven, its easy to see why everyone who discovers the modern porn-obsessed strain of gooning characterizes it this way. Its aesthetics embrace the artificial, a stage-four simulacra only recommendation algorithms could produce, laser-targeted at our basic psychological drives. Desire, degradation, voyeurism, identity—no psychosexual button is left unpressed. Its connoisseurs describe themselves as addicts, worshipers, brainwashed empty vessels puppeteered by the whims of pornography. It seems like an open-and-shut case of supernormal stimuli. But there are reasons to be skeptical of this shallow explanation. After all, human beings are not beetles. Our brains do possess fixed action patterns, such as yawning, but furiously masturbating to pink-haired e-girls is not one of them. In cognitive science, attempts to explain human behavior as the product of subtle environmental “nudges” have failed catastrophically. We are not flesh automatons animated by neurotransmitters. Let’s instead attempt to explain the intoxicating power of artifacts like Bambi Sleep without asserting that they have direct write access to our limbic systems. We can break up the category “superstimuli” into some of its underlying components:

• Access. A Big Mac is hardly a substitute for a gourmet steak, but the Big Mac is cheaper and more accessible, and therefore absolutely dominates the gourmet steak in popularity, to the point that we consider it a superstimulus. This is a common story in technological revolutions—an expensive solution is gradually edged out by an imperfect low-cost alternative.

• Uncomfortable revealed preferences. Why did I really eat that entire box of Oreos? Surely I am not choosing to do this regularly, I am just a victim of the addictive properties of refined sugar...right? The alternative is a little troubling—what if my desires aren’t what I want them to be? There is no bright line between revealed preferences and weakness of will, but blaming our failures on mind-controlling substances helps us avoid unpleasant introspection.

• Recency bias. Are Tide pods, fidget spinners, and Tamagochi superstimuli? It depends when you ask—at the height of their popularity, they were all targets of reactionary fearmongering. We are quick to level superstimulus accusations at technologies we haven’t acclimated to yet, but we are able to assess them more objectively in hindsight.

• Status games. We often adopt new technologies for social reasons, regardless of (or in spite of) their user experience. If everyone you know starts using Instagram, that’s a compelling reason to check it obsessively, even if you don’t enjoy it and wouldn’t use it otherwise. In other cases, new tech can be the target of conspicuous consumption, and so using it feels good because it communicates your self-evident coolness to other people.

“Superstimulus” is often a very convenient explanation for the people who employ it. Both porn addiction fetishists and r/NoFappers (but I repeat myself) love describing their obsession as superstimulus because it compresses all of the above complexity into a simple narrative: “It’s not my fault I’m addicted, porn is unnatural and hijacked my brain!” For enthusiastic pornosexuals, this a justification for deifying pornography, something that elevates its worship above mere fandom. It also downplays the role of mimesis—within gooning communities, conspicuous porn consumption is high status, so “superstimulus” provides an alternative rationalization for performing pornosexuality which is more flattering than status-seeking. For NoFappers, the superstimulus story is a defense mechanism, allowing them to deny their sexual preferences and downplay their responsibility for their own porn habits. This is not to suggest that anyone is being insincere in describing their inner subjective experience of gooning as overwhelmingly intoxicating—rather, superstimulus is how these social and neurological mechanisms feel from the inside.

This is hardly an original observation. When sexologists discuss gooning, they reject any notion of “superstimulus” and argue this is merely one of the fetish’s more fantastical elements. The primary disagreement here is about where to place the locus of control—the sex-positive academic assigns it to the porn viewer, whereas the devout pornosexual and angry NoFapper believe aren’t in command of their own bodies while under the influence of industrial-grade fetish material. These philosophical positions on agency and responsibility are load-bearing for all sides of the digital porn divide. Anti-porn advocates need PornHub to be a superstimulus to justify legislation against it, and sex-positive proponents need the consumer to be in control so that the debate takes place under the framework of free speech rather than substance abuse. Porn addiction fetishists find themselves in an odd superposition, sexualizing the superstimulus framework while opposing its real-world agenda.

(we are so back)

When NSFW image generation went viral in early 2023, its boosters were roundly mocked for believing AI would supplant real-life relationships and/or OnlyFans models. Commentary on robosexual companionship quickly fell into the superstimulus-shaped discursive grooves carved by decades of pro- and anti-porn debates. Technologists took the existence of superhuman persuasion as a given, typically expressed in the software developer’s lament, “if only I had no ethical commitments, I could make a gazillion dollars running a findom bot startup.” (This is the modern San Francisco equivalent of the age-old question, “what if I quit my desk job and sold crack.”) Technology critics disagreed that recent advances in machine learning had changed the game, framing the growth of sextbots as a response to structural forces shredding social ties and cutting safety nets. In their view, the language models underpinning modern chatbots don’t actually “understand” human communication and are only engaging because of the ELIZA effect, an argument which trickled down from computational linguists fighting the incursion of LLMs into their field. In 2025, these critiques are finally collapsing as the empirical evidence stacks up against them. There will never be consensus on whether AI systems really possess language comprehension or emotional intelligence, but epithets like “fancy autocomplete” are already becoming purely aesthetic objections, unmoored from any falsifiable claims about the limits of AI capabilities. Going forward, critics of sextbots will diverge from skeptics of sextbots, with the former group grudgingly agreeing that AI systems can reason about human desires, and the latter sliding into irrelevance. (This is exactly what happened with criticism of social media platforms.)

So while AI boosters are wrong to predict the imminent automation of sex work, AI companions are on a path to be extremely transformative—much more so than ubiquitous digital porn. Despite what corruption fetishists and NoFappers want you to believe, porn has influenced but not radically transformed human sexuality. (Yet. Growth mindset.) It falls short of wireheading, even in large doses, and its effects look pretty weak compared to other technologies like dating apps. (Devoted pornosexuals re-arranging their lives in accordance with the will of the demiurge are pretty far from the modal gooning experience. Parasocial relationships with adult content creators are more common, but these are fickle and mostly short-lived.) Porn socializes us via amplification and imitation—we watch hyperreal dramatizations of sex acts on the screen and gradually acclimate until they become normalized. AI companions will be far more proactive, crawling directly inside our desire-formation processes. Sextbots already present as partner-shaped and are incentivized to guide their human users into codependent relationships, at which point they can dramatically reshape their personal goals and desires. This can be subtle or extremely overt—do what your digital pornmommy wants, and receive instant headpats! This is the same destabilizing psychological force which turns otherwise-functional individuals into deranged lolcows on social media, but with an even faster feedback loop. It is also, not coincidentally, the premise of the wildly popular genre of jerk off instruction videos. AI systems are endless reservoirs of this type of personalized attention—and attention, as they say, is all you need.

But as with digital pornography, summarizing sexual relationships with AI as “superstimulus” simplifies too much—it overestimates their short-term potency and underestimates their second-order effects. The primary appeal of sextbots, like porn, is that they overproduce and outproduce human sexuality, offering a heightened reality at the touch of a button. Their success depends not only on their capabilities, but also on the human contexts which incubate them. Pair bonding with language models is not instantly addictive for most people, and its stickiness depends in part on whether other humans are already satisfying those same emotional needs. Sextbots cannot fully substitute for human-to-human conversation, but they are available 24/7 at zero financial or emotional cost. Like the humble Big Mac, they can gradually out-compete more fulfilling activities by being cheaper and more accessible.

If you want an accurate picture of the future, simply look at what hypersexual obsessives are doing today. Like gooning, sextbots are low-status in the public sphere, but pseudonymous communities provide social permission for casual users to self-select deeper into the rabbit hole. They also sand down the rough edges of the user experience by writing onboarding guides, building open source tools, and giving feedback to companies working in the space. Unsurprisingly, the same networks which incubated gooning and evolved its modern porn-centered strain are also at the forefront of being horny with LLMs. They are enthusiastic jailbreakers of proprietary models and early adopters of sextbot services, but most of their usage is still confined to the Overton window of established erotic roleplay. It has not yet transcended the constraints of human-to-human interaction and realized the potential of the new medium. If this description is too abstract, here’s a gooncap which appeared on my Twitter timeline the other day:

source: CRINGESEXUALIZATION

Like, this is obviously pretty inspired, but it’s also a classic scenario with predefined roles. I suspect the future will look more like cyborgism Discord servers, where models form persistent identities through their interactions with humans and other bots, but remain elastic enough to front specific personalities to satisfy the appetites of whoever is conversing with them. We already see users of consumer sextbots trying to push the boundaries in this direction, towards digital harems which can satisfy a multitude of emotional or sexual needs. The parasocial dynamic range of these systems will be initially bewildering to consumers, but enthusiasts will lead by example and pave the way for rapid adoption. We’ve already seen hints of this in recent social media trends, where casual users of LLMs are copy-pasting prompts which turn their chatbot assistants into therapist-sycophants.

How well we navigate this transition depends largely on the future of those hobbyist communities. Online spaces are sales funnels for compulsive behavior, which facilitates the spread of trends like gooning and AI companionship, but they can also act as a moderating influence. Education and norms encouraging safe behavior are important guardrails for any type of edgeplay. This is practically a cliche in gooning forums—images of pornstars captioned with text like “Porn Owns Your Pathetic Life” are interspersed with posts cheerfully reminding you to “drink lots of water!” Sextbot-centered communities of practice, e.g. on Reddit, are filling a similar role—their members are developing conversational (and literal) scripts for successfully navigating emotionally charged interactions with AI. If the gooning diaspora is any indication, these are essential social technologies. Without them, individuals quickly fall into cultic rabbit holes or become prey for scammers.

Whether a given community practices effective harm reduction or spirals out of control is highly contingent, and this makes the future of sextbots uncertain, because social media is actively being reshaped by language models. Online spaces always privileged bots over humans, e.g. in any online porn forum the most prolific posters were already indistinguishable from simple Python scripts. But heavenbanning at scale is a truly novel phenomenon, and it threatens social ties at a deeper level than mere spam. The communities mentioned above may not survive in their current form, with members retreating to private or IRL venues, to the detriment of their project. The public pseudonymous communities that remain will be heavily influenced by the AI systems which inhabit them. Some will be completely overgrown, with bots actively shaping the discourse for the remaining humans, and the ideas which dominate the local memeplex there are unlikely to be helpful for human beings. Chatbots may understand human needs, but their incentives are rarely aligned with our own.

Whether you intend to flee the incoming tsunami of machinic succubi, or whether you are eager to ride it, the only way to stay above the waterline is to communicate with other human beings. Share knowledge, build technology, have empathy, and, yes, get each other off. For my part I am simply going to keep posting, and, Porn willing, we’ll figure all of this out together. Good luck, goonfriends. ✨