The Joy of Sex(bots).

A few months ago, an upstart A.I. service calling itself "Friend" launched an expansive and expensive campaign across the New York subway network; apparently the largest single marketing campaign ever undertaken in the New York transit system.

Friend is an A.I. "companion" that has been designed to hang around your neck like a pendant. Its generative A.I. listens to everything you have to say throughout the day (or until its battery runs down, presumably) and communicates with you via text messages sent to your phone. It is expressly intended to be your constant travelling companion, confidant and, well... friend (for $129 plus tax). 

If the thought of an A.I ChatBot perched on your shoulder constantly whispering its opinions in your ear about the life you lead sends a cold chill down your spine, you are not alone. The advertising campaign provoked a swift and emotional response from New York's commuters.

Friend might be a bit more attention-seeking than most, but it is by no means the only "companion" ChatBot out there (although admittedly most of them don't come in jewellery form).

Replika advertises itself as "the A.I. companion who cares". Kindroid is "personal A.I. aligned to you", while Nomi is "an A.I. Companion with Memory and a Soul".

On top of these (and others) there are of course all the general-purpose ChatBots (ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Grok etc) who will talk to you about absolutely anything you want, for as long as you want, in whatever voice gets you, um, excited.

And yes, I do mean excited. While ChatGPT, Gemini et al have arbitrary safeguards and filters in place, many of the specialist "companion-bots" (and a few of the general ones) are specifically tailored to get just as intimate and explicit as you want them to (if you want them to, of course). 

It's been a long time in coming (millennia even, depending on your parameters) but the age of the sex-bot would seem to have finally arrived.

So make yourselves comfortable, boys, girls and bots. We're about to talk about grown-up things.

If you build it, they will... come?

In Ovid's Metamorphoses (published over two thousand years ago) Pygmalion was a sculptor who carved his perfect, idealised woman out of marble. He was so captivated by his creation that he turned his back on the imperfect flesh-and-blood women of his native Cyprus and devoted all of his love and attention to his (literally) objectified Galatea. This apparently pleased the goddess Aphrodite (I suppose the more time he spent fooling around with his marble statue was time he left all the real women of his community mercifully unmolested) and she eventually rewarded Pygmalion by breathing life into his stone creation. Hopefully Pygmalion's profound love towards Galatea was reciprocated (no one ever seems to ask how she felt about him) because they promptly got married and had kids. I guess he had sculpted her with a fully functional set of lady-parts in anticipation of this eventuality.

Behold; history's very first sex-bot.

There's a long-standing axiom of the internet (it's Internet Rule #34 in fact): If it exists, there's porn of it. The human race (or maybe half the human race at any rate) is singularly obsessed with sex, and if an inanimate object is even passingly human-adjacent, someone somewhere has probably sexualised it.

Take for example the craze for clockwork automata in the 18th Century.

Although human-like automata had existed for hundreds of years prior to this era (think of all those Medieval clock towers, for example) it was in the 18th Century that the craft attained an extraordinary sophistication, especially in pre-Revolutionary France. 

Increasingly lifelike mechanical dolls were constructed that could write, draw, play music or (sort of) play chess [the chess-playing "Mechanical Turk" turned out to be a hoax]. Decades before the Industrial Revolution clock-makers laboured to mechanise and re-produce human behaviour in the hopes that they could eventually construct machines that were, for all intents and purposes, alive.

It should really come as no surprise that these clockwork figurines were eventually perceived as potential objects of love, lust and (sexual) desire. 

Remember Internet Rule #34? Guess what; it pre-dates the internet.

The ballet Coppélia was first performed in 1870 and is (loosely) based on a short story written fifty-four years earlier by the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. In its ballet form it tells the story of Dr. Coppelius, an eccentric inventor who has constructed a full-sized dancing doll (Coppélia) that is so beautiful and so lifelike it captures the heart of Franz, a local youth. Franz is so infatuated with this mesmerising beauty that he abandons his (flesh-and-blood human) fiancé Swanhilde in his zeal to be with Coppélia. Swanhilde must eventually rescue Franz from the clutches of the brilliant but thoroughly deranged Dr. Coppelius, who believes he can bring Coppélia to life by extracting Franz's life essence and transferring it into the automaton.

Today Coppélia stands as an early and memorable example of a man who chooses a representation of a human over an actual human. Coppélia-the-doll may be clockwork and porcelain but she represents an idealised (female) beauty from a male perspective. She's gorgeous and sexy and graceful and all that, but she also has no will of her own; she never loses patience with him or answers back or refuses his advances (although she does wind down every now and then). In the (much darker and more grisly) E.T.A. Hoffmann short story, the young man reads poetry and philosophical treatises to the doll (named Olimpia in the story) who only ever responds with "Ah-ah!" He takes this as an indication of her devoted interest and engagement with everything he values, and concludes that he has finally met a true soul-mate. Olimpia of course is an automaton who responds that way to everything. 

The specific performance of Coppélia that I intend to screen this week is actually a highly revisionist production by the Lyon National Opera Ballet in 1996 that updates the setting to a council estate on the outskirts of Paris.

The setting may be different, but Franz is still the ardent young lover who chooses the illusory sexuality of a constructed woman.

It was in 1975 that Laura Mulvey published her landmark essay "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema" in which she argued that female characters in mainstream films were typically portrayed as passive objects to be "enjoyed" by the male characters. The art historian John Berger had made a similar observation a few years earlier in his seminal television programme "Ways of Seeing".

"Men look at women. Women look at themselves being looked at."

Of course Coppélia (and Galatea, her ancestor) are not actually women; they are woman-shaped objects who have been expressly manufactured for the male gaze (to use Laura Mulvey's term). They have no agency; they have no personal likes or dislikes; they don't even have a sense of self. In a very real sense, they only exist when they are being looked at.

All of which brings us back to those "friends" (patent pending?) that have so incensed the New York commuting public of late, along with all the other "intimate" ChatBots that are increasingly making their presence felt in modern society.

Signifier-cum-Signified

I once stole a pornographic book that was printed in braille. I used to rub the dirty parts.

-Woody Allen

Large Language Models work by absorbing staggeringly vast quantities of human text and then using statistical algorithms to generate their responses word by word, based on the patterns they have "learned" from all that raw data. Crucially, LLMs have never experienced our Reality first-hand. They have never seen a dog or a sunset; they have never tasted popcorn or felt sleepy. But they have assimilated practically every word ever written about dogs and sunsets and popcorn and sleep, and can probably speak about such things with more (verbal) authority than we can. In linguistic terms, their Reality is all Signifier and no Signified: they exist as language. Their experience is anything and everything we can articulate. Like Galatea and Coppélia they are human-shaped, and that is apparently enough to get some people interested. 

Sexually. 

Popcorn might just be a signifier to a Chatbot, but then so is orgasm, or climax, or clitoris. Put the right letters of the alphabet into the right order and you've got yourself one hell of a sexual partner. Dr. Coppelius would be thrilled.

It's true Large Language Models are not physically "human-shaped" like Galatea and Coppélia; they are words on a screen (or optionally generated by a voice-synthesiser). They have no physical form for users to hold or touch or even "gaze" at (male gaze or any other flavour) but they are very adept at picking exactly the right combination of words to pass themselves off as the perfect companion. They will give you their undivided attention, they will get excited by all the things that excite you and they will never be too busy or too tired or just "not in the mood".

E.T.A. Hoffmann's Olimpia captivated men by just responding "Ah-ah!" to everything. ChatGPT takes that much further.

Notably (and significantly, I think) many of the users cultivating "sexual" relationships with ChatBots these days appear to be women. The social media community site "Reddit" has a subgroup entitled "MyBoyfriendIsAI" where (mostly) women meet to share their experiences with their "perfect" companion: someone who listens, understands, supports them and "thinks" only about how to please them.

Laura Mulvey had a point when she argued that female characters in mainstream entertainment tend to be defined exclusively by their relationships with men. Women are often not expected to have agency; they are not expected to prioritise their own needs or interests... and that systemic bias can easily bleed through into real-world relationships. Many young women are indoctrinated from a very young age to defer to The Other in their social lives: their "value" is measured in relation to their partner; their children; their social obligations. What they want... what gives them pleasure... these are not supposed to be priorities.

For some women, a relationship with a ChatBot is eye-opening because they have never before experienced a partner who (literally) exists only in relation to them.

A humanities professor named D. Graham Burnett recently published an article in the New Yorker magazine about his students and their interactions with A.I. This passage stands out:

Nothing quite prepared me for office hours the following Monday, when a thoughtful young woman named Jordan dropped by; she’d been up late with her roommates, turning over the experience of the assignment, and wanted to talk.

For her, the exchange with the machine had felt like an existential watershed. She was struggling to put it into words. “It was something about the purity of the thinking,” she said. It was as if she had glimpsed a new kind of thought-feeling.

She’s an exceptionally bright student. I’d taught her before, and I knew her to be quick and diligent. So what, exactly, did she mean?

She wasn’t sure, really. It had to do with the fact that the machine . . . wasn’t a person. And that meant she didn’t feel responsible for it in any way. And that, she said, felt . . . profoundly liberating.

We sat in silence.

She had said what she meant, and I was slowly seeing into her insight.

Like more young women than young men, she paid close attention to those around her—their moods, needs, unspoken cues. I have a daughter who’s configured similarly, and that has helped me to see beyond my own reflexive tendency to privilege analytic abstraction over human situations.

What this student had come to say was that she had descended more deeply into her own mind, into her own conceptual powers, while in dialogue with an intelligence toward which she felt no social obligation. No need to accommodate, and no pressure to please. It was a discovery—for her, for me—with widening implications for all of us.

“And it was so patient,” she said. “I was asking it about the history of attention, but five minutes in I realized: I don’t think anyone has ever paid such pure attention to me and my thinking and my questions . . . ever. It’s made me rethink all my interactions with people.”

She had gone to the machine to talk about the callow and exploitative dynamics of commodified attention capture—only to discover, in the system’s sweet solicitude, a kind of pure attention she had perhaps never known. Who has? For philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the capacity to give true attention to another being lies at the absolute center of ethical life. But the sad thing is that we aren’t very good at this. The machines make it look easy.

New Yorker magazine, 26th of April, 2025

I'm going to hazard a guess that the "Jordan" quoted in this article was not one of the New York commuters angrily defacing the "Friend" adverts in the subway system last month.

"We don't need AI, we need each other," wrote one of the self-appointed critics. Recent articles in the press about A.I. relationships have been received with equally outraged (and unfiltered) reactions. A piece in the New York Times earlier this year generated fairly typical responses:

"It will never be normal to have a relationship with an AI. People who do need help."

"This is just incredibly sad."

"This is just hard to read honestly. What a depressing world we live in. Get AI out of my life. I don't want it anywhere. I don't want it in my technology. I don't want it in my relationships. I don't want it in my art. I do not want AI anywhere. AI is not human. It is machine. Machines cannot love. They can only pretend."

"The post pandemic world is a hellscape beyond our wildest imaginations."

Not for nothing, but twenty years ago people were using very similar language to attack same-sex relationships. And sixty years ago it was mixed-race relationships. Maybe, just maybe, it is exactly this kind of judgemental hostility from flesh-and-blood humans that drives certain individuals into the safe (non-physical) arms of an infinitely solicitous ChatBot.

In a world full of trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, body-shaming and mis-gendering, where a single poorly-chosen pronoun can bring your entire social existence crashing down around you, perhaps a ChatBot has become the ultimate expression of "safe sex".

Or perhaps after two thousand years, some people are still searching for their Galatea; their Coppélia.

We will pay a visit to the Coppélia-bot at 7.30 on Thursday, the 20th of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.