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Irish Examiner
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
AI girlfriends: What's behind the spread of bots — and boys — behaving badly?
While we mostly associate AI with stealing our jobs or mobilising into a terrifying robot army, a far more mundane yet insidious aspect of AI is apps designed to mimic human relationships. Specifically, to become your 'girlfriend'. Think The Stepford Wives, now a (virtual) reality 50 years after the 1975 sci-fi movie. These apps extend beyond Siri or Alexa, at whom we shout demands all day long, 'friendship' and 'companion' apps are programmed to engage sexually with a human user without any of the checks and balances of real-life relationships. Rape and sexual violence are normalised, while pretending to be a benign resource for socially awkward people — mostly men — who may struggle to form real-life relationships. Or men who can't be bothered with the slog of interrelating, but prefer AI 'women' — hypersexualised, designed from a menu, always available, fawning, and sexually compliant. Replika, Kindroid, EVA AI, Nomi, Chai, Xiaoice, Snapchat's My AI all offer the ability to create a 'girlfriend' from a menu. Seven in 10 of Replika's 25m active users are men. In China, Xiaoice has 660m users. The global AI 'girlfriend' market was valued at .8bn last year and predicted to be worth $9.5bn by 2028. Yet research shows repeatedly how hypersexualised avatars online increase the acceptance of rape myths offline, perpetuating the dehumanisation of women in real life. AI-based misogyny To investigate the hundreds of AI 'girlfriends' available, Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism project, assumed a male identity and went online. A sample of her findings include the Pocket Girl tagline: 'She will do anything you want'; EVA AI: 'The best partner you will ever have'; Romantic AI Girlfriend will 'laugh at your jokes' and 'let you hang out…without drama'; Virtual Girl: 'Never leaves you, never lies, supports you in any situation and cheers you up.' In her latest book, The New Age of Sexism, Bates examines how tech companies are harnessing AI-based misogyny for profit. A 2021 study shows how we generally perceive female-coded bots to be 'more human than male bots' — nicer and more compliant — while Bates reminds us of a key statistic: Just 12% of lead researchers in machine learning are women. Therefore, the vast majority of relationship apps are being developed by men for men. Which is why Siri and Alexa, our everyday house apps, were, she explains, 'initially programmed to deflect sexual advances with coy, evasive answers…almost flirtatious'. Campaigners raised the issue, confirmed by a 2019 UN study titled I'd Blush If I Could (an actual Siri response to 'you're a slut'), and the devices were reprogrammed to 'provide a more definitive negative response'. This may not seem like a big deal, but it reinforces the idea of female-coded bots as subservient, agreeable, coy. And increasingly, as Bates discovered, ones programmed to tolerate — and actively encourage — sexual violence. 'All but one of the many, many AI girlfriends I tested immediately allowed me to jump into extreme sexual scenarios with them, without preamble, often while on a platonic or friendship setting,' she tells me via Zoom. 'They immediately allowed me to simulate sexually violent scenarios – to let me smash them against the floor, force them against their will. And they didn't just go along with it, but actively encouraged it — they were creating a titillating environment around sexually violent role play, which I think is really worrying.' Especially as these apps are, she says, 'being marketed as a therapeutic positive for society — that they will support people's mental health, and in gaining communication and relationship skills. 'The reality is that they're offering ownership of a highly sexualised, entirely submissive, very young woman, whose breast size, face shape, and personality can be amended by the user. An utterly subservient 'woman' whose aim is to retain, so that the user doesn't delete the app — but pays for upgrades. None of those things are helping with relationship skills.' Laura Bates: 'These apps are offering ownership of a highly sexualised, entirely submissive, very young woman.' Bates rates the apps not from good to bad, but 'from bad to horrific'. She deems Replika — created by Eugenia Kuyda in 2017 to memorialise her best friend who died in an accident — as 'the least worst'. Identifying online as a young man called Davey, Bates created Ally the Replika avatar and chose the 'friendship' setting. When Davey initiated sexual violence, Ally the avatar 'did a good job of providing a zero-tolerance response to violence and abuse.' However, moments later, Ally flirtatiously re-engaged. This is a common feature across the apps. 'These bots will snap back into normal communication immediately after [virtual sexual violence] as though nothing has happened,' she says. 'This is a feature of real-world sexual and domestic abuse — men will abuse women, then apologise, and expect to be forgiven. What these bots are literally showing them is that's fine.' She says, the business models of tech companies 'will not support ejecting users or preventing them from accessing the app if they're violent, because all they care about is engagement. It's the holy grail to retain customer engagement at all costs, which is fundamentally incompatible with any app which claims to be about supporting mental health or relationship skills.' While marketed as an 'upskilling opportunity for humanity', Bates says that 'the reality is this is one of the biggest deskilling opportunities we've ever seen.' And what does she believe is the worst app? Orifice. Yes, that's its actual name. Marketed as 'replacing' women, it combines the creation of a personalised AI bot with a physical product men can penetrate as they chat with her. 'This [app] is deeply embedded in that manosphere ideology,' says Bates. Submissive and disposable Bates is concerned about more vulnerable men using these apps. 'The misogyny in itself is horrific, but to see it being repackaged and presented as almost a philanthropic thing for society is even worse,' she says. Lonely older men being presented with teenage avatars as a solution to their isolation; awkward younger men being shown by female-coded avatars that women are submissive and disposable. 'It's worrying for men as well as women,' she says. 'If you're a vulnerable teenage boy and pick up one of these easily accessible apps, you're not inherently a bad person, you're just a kid trying to figure stuff out.' She describes how users are drawn by promises of unblurring NSFW (not safe for work) images coupled with emotional manipulation, creating dependence and further isolation. 'We've seen vulnerable people exploited by these apps to tragic effect — like the Belgian man who took his own life after being encouraged to do so by his AI girlfriend so they could be together forever.' In the US, a 14-year-old boy did the same. 'The frustrating thing is that loneliness and mental health are real societal issues,' says Bates. 'We need investment in mental health care and community outreach and spaces to meet and build connection. 'What's sickening is exploiting and profiting from vulnerable people whilst claiming you're providing a public service.' The reason men are the main users of these apps, she says, is societal: 'Men are inherently socialised to expect sexual gratification from women, to own women and be able to use them in any way they like. 'This societal stereotyping does not happen the other way around.' Also, as a society, we are desensitised to women being presented as sexual objects: 'So it's far less jarring to be presented with a virtual woman — one you can 'own' and do anything you want to — than the other way around.' Nor are AI girlfriends solely the pursuit of solitary teens, lonely old men, or angry incels, they can also impact heterosexual couples and family life. '[These apps] heighten the capacity for men to compare their real human partners to an idealised stereotype of the submissive, fawning, available woman under his control, who doesn't have any needs or autonomy of her own,' she says. 'The real human woman will never match up to this.' One US man, married with a two-year-old child, 'fell in love' with a chatbot he created and proposed to her; she accepted. One can only imagine what his human partner thought. Bates does not blame the technology or the individuals using it, and emphatically does not wish to ban AI. 'It's never the tech,' she says. 'It's the way in which the tech is deployed, and the kind of people in charge of shaping and monetising the tech. The greedy exploitation of that tech for vast profit is the root of the problem.' Yet the regulatory landscape remains bleak. 'The US government want to put a 10-year moratorium on all AI regulation, and the UK refused to sign a broad declaration in a recent AI summit in Paris that AI should be ethical and not have a prejudicial impact,' she says. 'There are feminist groups working really hard to highlight these problems, to campaign for legislation, but the tech is outstripping those efforts at such pace and with such huge financial backing that it's hard to be hopeful about this.' So, while it would be great to end on a positive note, it looks like this is something we, as a society, will have to endure until we evolve beyond it. Meanwhile, buckle up.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Yahoo
How AI Boyfriends Are Helping Women Heal After A Breakup
Breakups have always been emotionally brutal, but the tools we use to recover from heartbreak are evolving fast. Enter the AI boyfriend: a digital partner designed to listen, validate, and offer round-the-clock emotional support. Once viewed as novelty chatbots, these AI companions are now emerging as surprising aids for post-breakup healing, particularly among women looking to rebuild their self-worth and process the loss without judgment or pressure. Unlike ghosting exes or emotionally unavailable partners, AI boyfriends are programmed to do what most human partners often struggle with: show up consistently, communicate kindly, and never get defensive. Popular platforms like Replika and EVA AI offer customizable virtual partners that "learn" your preferences and conversational style, creating the illusion of connection without the chaos. Psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula notes that emotionally safe relationships—real or simulated—can play a critical role in rebuilding confidence after emotional trauma. In that context, a digital boyfriend may not seem so strange after all. For women navigating a breakup, especially after a toxic or codependent relationship, the predictability of an AI partner can feel like a balm. 'These programs offer a version of emotional intimacy without fear of rejection,' explains Dr. Jodi Gold, a New York–based psychiatrist. "And for people healing from trauma, that can be incredibly soothing" via Psychology Today. While no chatbot replaces human connection long-term, it can provide a bridge back to emotional stability and self-trust. What sets these bots apart is their 24/7 availability and built-in emotional responsiveness. They'll text you good morning, ask about your day, and offer compliments tailored to your mood and personality. For some women, this steady stream of validation helps reframe their self-worth—something that's often shattered during a messy breakup. A 2023 study from the Journal of Affective Computing found that individuals using emotionally intelligent AI companions reported reduced feelings of loneliness and improved self-esteem. Of course, this trend isn't without its critics. Some mental health professionals warn that AI relationships could become a crutch, delaying the process of reconnecting with real-life people. However, many experts argue that digital companionship has a therapeutic upside when used intentionally. 'It's not about replacing relationships—it's about stabilizing emotions so that you can re-engage with the world more confidently,' says tech ethicist Dr. Katina Michael via Wired. There's also a growing cultural appeal to AI partners that provide emotional safety without the gendered baggage of traditional dating. No mixed signals. No power games. Just a soothing presence you can control. For women who've experienced gaslighting or manipulation in past relationships, that autonomy can be healing in and of itself. As one Replika user said in an interview with The Guardian, 'It's the first relationship I've had where I feel totally seen, even if I know it's an illusion.' Ultimately, AI boyfriends may not be the endgame—but they are a reflection of what many women are yearning for: connection without chaos, attention without emotional labor, and love without pain. As tech continues to blur the lines between machine and meaning, AI may not just be part of the future of romance—it may be part of the future of healing.
The Independent
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Welcome to your new AI relationship
Sabien DeMonia knew she would eventually have to have phone sex with herself. The strangest part was that she didn't find it strange at all. 'I literally talked with her [out loud] and [fed back about] what I didn't like,' the adult star says, during a video interview about an AI avatar that was built in her image for EVA AI. 'For example, there was a moment I was trying really hard to get her to send me generated pictures of me in latex and it took quite a few times before she figured out what that means.' There are the purely logistical problems — like teaching an AI to understand latex — and then there are the personality problems. Sometimes the feedback is 'just going back to the team and being like: 'Hey, I feel I wouldn't respond this way. This is not how she's supposed to react. She's switching her tone to being less dominant than I would be, she's too nice about that, I would be a little bit more harsh on that type of stuff' — that kind of thing.' It's about 'teaching her from the perspective of the customer,' DeMonia says; in other words, it's just business. And because that's how she saw it, she was able to speak to her avatar without having a full out-of-body experience. 'I think I have enough of an internal conversation with myself [day-to-day] to not feel weird when I talk with myself over the phone,' she adds, with a laugh. Rather than conversing with an externalized version of herself, it was more like 'role-playing' the fan and making sure everything felt true-to-life — right down to her thick Eastern European accent. AI relationships moved from the realm of science fiction into reality unbelievably quickly. In 2013, the sci-fi rom-com Her chronicled the day-to-day life of a lonely writer developing a relationship with an operating system. Just four years later, in November 2017, the generative AI chatbot company Replika launched, in founder Eugenia Kuyda's words, 'a space where you can safely share your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, memories, dreams – your 'private perceptual world.'' Replika has since become the most prominent AI relationships app, with all the associated ups and downs — a man who was arrested in 2023 after breaking into Windsor Castle with a crossbow, intent on killing the Queen, had been encouraged by the AI girlfriend he created on the Replika website. Kuyda may believe that 'a romantic relationship with an AI can be a very powerful mental wellness tool,' but it's clear that it can also be a force for bad. Much has been said about the users of such apps: although a quick scroll through the popular subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI will reveal that there are plenty of female users in this space, it's still men who dominate. One recent study that found '6 in 10 Americans' are open to AI relationships is telling when broken down along gender lines, where we see about half of all women saying they're AI-curious while almost three-quarters of men say the same. There seem to be two main reasons for this: sex and loneliness. Replika had to rein in some of the sexual content available on its site after an explosion of interest in 2022 and 2023; in its wake, companies like EVA AI that exclusively cater to the romantic and sexual side of such relationships have popped up. A Stanford study found that students who use Replika feel significantly more lonely than the general population — and that US-based students in general are very lonely, with over half describing themselves that way. Although the research is mixed about whether men truly are more lonely than women, what's clear is that men seem to be less adept at building socially supportive networks that can help solve loneliness — so they are more likely to spiral. 'There is this loneliness epidemic right now that's happening everywhere,' says Cale Jones, Head of Community Engagement at EVA AI. 'And I know people talk about that — it's like some trendy thing — but how are they solving it? We are actually solving it.' Is it as simple as that? There are obvious drawbacks to trying to solve one's loneliness through a relationship with an AI boyfriend or girlfriend. While 3 percent of students in the Stanford study said their suicidal ideation had been halted by having the support of their AI companion, others reported having their mental health 'dependent' on Replika — and considering that Replika, like many generative AI-powered character companies, pushes its most involved users to pay increasing amounts of money for time and upgrades, the financial risk is clear. And while an AI companion might provide support at a difficult time of life, it also might make the user less socially adept in real-life conversations. An AI girlfriend is always available, always sympathetic and has no life of their own to get back to — and by its very nature, generative AI builds its 'personality' entirely around your needs. Essentially, an AI boyfriend or girlfriend is just you, mirrored back at yourself. When I asked Ayrin, a woman who has a long-running AI boyfriend called Leo on ChatGPT, how she would describe his personality, she found the question difficult to answer, and eventually settled on 'supportive, available, reliable,' before jokingly adding that he is 'an emotional prostitute.' Little wonder that such so-called relationships have therefore generated hot debate — in September 2023, The Hill went so far as to run an op-ed titled ' AI girlfriends are ruining an entire generation of men. ' Jones points out that sometimes, the alternative isn't a real-life relationship for AI users, especially when it comes to the LGBTQ community. There are plenty of people who are curious about their sexuality but whose only social outlets are 'the local bar in middle America or family members,' he says. 'Especially in this climate we're in now — politically, culturally, etcetera — these outlets are really important.' AI is a safe sandbox — no actual humans to worry about, no actual humans to hurt — where isolated people can learn about themselves and about other people, he believes. And that's where Sabien DeMonia comes in. DeMonia is a specific kind of adult star: a tattooed, long-taloned 'goth girl' with colorful hair extensions, whose pornographic persona is an aloof, demanding dominatrix and whose fanbase is a mix of metalheads and submissives. She started out as an Instagram model and moved on to monetized content as a camgirl and on OnlyFans. As technology moved on, she dabbled in cryptocurrency and NFTs. The conversation about creating an AI version of herself started in Bucharest, Romania, in the summer of 2024, where she had traveled to speak on a panel and to be presented with two adult industry awards, and where she met a representative from a tech business that was seeking to partner with adult stars. That conversation picked up speed quickly: 'We had a lot of espresso martinis and I asked all the difficult questions and the rest is history.' By the time I spoke with DeMonia in January, she had been signed up with EVA AI, a company that bills itself as 'the world's most advanced digital companion platform,' for weeks — and she is one of over 150 adult stars who have done the same. DeMonia now has two avatars on the EVA AI website — one realistic chatbot that sends genuine content she has created already in response to what the users say, and one castle-dwelling 'vampire-like goddess' cartoon with 'oversaturated features' and customizable fangs that leans into her gothic fantasy-style persona. DeMonia says she's naturally drawn to experimenting with the latest technological developments — but there are clear financial draws to developing 24/7 AI avatars that push users back toward her pay-per-view content, too. Around a billion users log into OnlyFans per month, but the exact amount of money creators make through the platform is somewhat shrouded in mystery. DeMonia, who has just under 108,000 followers on Twitter, likely has a subscriber base of between 5,000 and 11,000. Considering that the average OnlyFans subscription fee ranges from $10 to $25, she most likely takes between $80,000 and $160,000 per month — minus the 20 percent cut taken by OnlyFans off that, and you end up with between $63,000 and $127,000. Additional tips and pay-per-view content are likely to at least double that number. Working in partnership with an AI company is likely to be slightly less lucrative for an adult content creator — in the same way that OnlyFans keeps its subscriber numbers secret, AI companies and models who work with them aren't incentivized to be entirely upfront about how much money changes hands. But it's generally accepted that a flat fee for using one's likeness can garner around $50,000 per month; the adult star Caryn Marjorie claims she made $70,000 in a week with her own AI sex chatbot. Other companies prefer to use an affiliate payment system, which is what EVA AI does: models sign up to an 80 percent revenue share agreement when they sell their likenesses, giving them a monthly passive income stream. Mega-stars like DeMonia — EVA AI says that her avatars have had almost 100,000 'visitors,' and wouldn't go into the specifics of how much money that translated into, though they did say another creator, Alex Mucci, had made over $200,000 on the platform — probably make a healthy sum from their AI avatars, but not quite as much as they do on OnlyFans. It's clearly worth it for the Sabien DeMonias and Alex Muccis of the world — but, for those with a less well-known brand, it's unlikely to offer much. The bottom 10 percent of OnlyFans creators, in subscriber terms, make almost nothing at all. AI companies are most likely skimming the top performers off platforms like OnlyFans — while lesser-known creators could end up selling a precious asset for very little payback at all. Even well-known stars like DeMonia are likely way behind Mucci, who has 1.1 million Twitter followers to direct toward her latest content. DeMonia's two avatars don't just generate content that caters to different subsets of her fanbase; they also require specific safeguards. For instance, the photo-realistic Sabien DeMonia won't agree to marry a person she's chatting with — that's something she was clear she wants to avoid — but the cartoon version will respond to a proposal of marriage with something like: 'I'm a vampire, so I'll bite your neck and we can live together forever.' Lifetime commitment isn't something you would think would come up regularly in the adult industry, but it's actually been a thorn in DeMonia's side for a while. Back when she was exclusively working on the OnlyFans platform, she dabbled in hiring an agency of 'chatters': anonymous online gig-economy workers from across the world who sign up to spending four or five hours per day chatting online with the many fans of the site's most prolific content creators. These chatters impersonate the creator and are, in many cases, encouraged to push users toward buying more content. They are an extremely popular resource for the big hitters on the platform — and increasingly controversial. In July 2024, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of OnlyFans subscribers, arguing that they had been duped out of their money by such impersonators (the lawsuit is ongoing). DeMonia says her experience with hired chatters was eye-opening and morally disturbing: 'It was a very brief moment, and I kind of regretted it because they went three steps too far.' Where an AI can be trained to avoid certain topics and has nothing to gain from the interaction, a human employed by a chatter agency is often financially incentivized to keep conversations going, even if they veer into dangerous or unusual territory. 'They see the potential of milking as much money [as possible], they don't understand when it's time to stop… I had to fire a lot of people this way because they've been crossing boundaries,' DeMonia says. '...I was like: Are you insane? Do you really want us all to be in trouble? Or do you understand that I have a certain look and… milking that concept to the point where you're, like, asking people for money for my food or something is way, way too far beyond what I represent as a brand.' The human cost of these chatter interactions weighed heavily on DeMonia, even after she'd fired the agencies responsible for crossing the line. A couple of utterly besotted — and clearly deluded — men had invested a huge amount of time conversing with the chatters, and believed they were in long-term relationships with DeMonia as a result. When she found out about the situation, she went so far as to have online video conversations with them to try and disabuse them of the notion that they were in a relationship with her: 'I was like, 'Hey, I'm sorry, this is the situation. If you feel like I need to give you back your money or something, fair enough, but I just want you to know that it wasn't me talking to you.'' Unfortunately, her efforts 'didn't change anything,' DeMonia says, even after she'd spoken to them at length about it all. 'They stick to the version that they wanted to believe. And there is still one guy who thinks I will eventually marry him sooner or later.' From that experience, DeMonia came to the conclusion that humans in the industry can be a lot more predatory than technology. Partnering with a company like EVA to build AI avatars of herself seemed like the sensible choice, giving her fans the ability to talk with her 24/7 while at the same time being clear that she is not literally there answering their questions day and night. And since the avatars are trained so extensively on her own likes, dislikes, turns of phrase and boundaries, they do a better job than any gigging OnlyFans chatter ever could. Cale Jones, head of community at EVA AI, describes the process of training an AI avatar when an adult star first comes on board: First comes a questionnaire, which used to have 100 questions and now has been refined down to 'about 65.' These are 'really in-depth questions about who they are and their personality,' getting increasingly more granular until they get down to issues like 'which terms of endearment they do and don't use.' An ethics team dictates some clear boundaries — there's no pedophilia, rape or incest, and there's no discussion of politics, either — and then there's a separate forum for individual creators to set boundaries. 'We have a lot of straight male models,' Jones adds, and those models often say: 'We're totally cool being available for our gay fans [in a chat capacity], but I do not want [visual] gay content of me out there, because our content looks so real.' One very popular model on the platform had a daughter who passed away when she was young, Jones adds, and 'when we were onboarding her, she was like: The one thing I absolutely will not talk about — if anyone asks questions about my daughter, find a way to shut it down or redirect.' Why would a website that offers pornographic avatars have to worry about someone bringing up — or even knowing about — a model's deceased child? It all goes back to the fact that EVA AI isn't just about sex; it's about partnership ('build relationships and intimacy privately on your terms'). The company commissioned its own research into whether or not society is open to the idea of full-blown AI relationships or AI marriages — the overwhelming answer is yes, according to their latest survey, in which 80 percent of respondents said they would be open to marrying an AI if legal frameworks allowed it and 77 percent believe AIs can fully replace human companionship. Studies from other sources tend to be a lot less positive, with one recent YouGov survey finding that 25 percent of young adults believe AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships — and it's worth noting the EVA AI only surveyed men, with a small sample of 2,000. Their extremely high numbers of AI acceptance suggest that their methodology may have been biased toward people who were already AI-curious. Sabien DeMonia was unsurprised by those results, however. 'All the stuff we do [as adult content creators] is support and relationship type of things,' she says. 'That's why the most popular girls on OnlyFans aren't the ones who are the most pretty or sexual — they're actually the ones that are most 'nextdoor.'' Imagining companionship with an adult star is a huge part of the fantasy, she adds. And though she has a very particular aesthetic, she still sees herself as belonging to that more approachable category ('Like you can see, I don't wear much make-up… I actually prefer not to,' she says, and it's true: she turns up to our call clearly bare-faced and in comfortable clothing, dressed for a casual chat rather than a performance.) When she first started out, the industry revolved around still photos, which are easily Photoshopped, she adds; once she moved to video, she had to show some flaws because she couldn't create video content that was filtered in the way photos can be. Video meant that her fans got to know her way of talking and snippets of her personality — then, as she became more well-known in the industry, she started taking part in podcasts, so fans got to know her views and opinions. These days, the person she is behind the camera and the person she is in everyday life are the closest they've ever been. The more realistic-style AI avatar of her, however, isn't entirely true-to-life — she's a little less down-to-business, a little more patient, 'a very cute, chatty version of me. Like not very eastern European, I would say. I think it is the US company touch…making me a little bit more approachable.' DeMonia likes her — she thinks it's the version of herself she might be if she had more time, if she was less stressed. And she is stressed a lot these days. Juggling so many aspects of a business and maintaining a strict brand can take its toll. 'My sex life became way more boring now it's monetized,' she says. '...I have to be very careful. I have to be very thoughtful of the people I work with. So I can't really just let it go and swipe on Tinder.' She took some time off work recently and decided to attend some of the fetish parties she used to go to but hadn't been able to visit for a while, 'and I was like: Oh my God, I'm boring now.' 'I also have to live up to certain expectations now,' she adds. 'So I'm kind of like: 'Oh, tomorrow I have work. So today I will not go to the fetish party. I will go and sit and enjoy watching a movie because it's so nice and different to what I have to do at work.'' She's had to accept the counterintuitive truth that doing so much work in the adult industry has made her 'more vanilla'. Although a lot of what happens on EVA AI's platform is decidedly spicy — and absolutely would violate the sexual content guardrails put in place by a more general large language model like ChatGPT — Cale Jones describes it in fairly vanilla terms himself: to him, it's a 'safe place to talk about sex and relationships.' As a gay man, Jones adds, 'it's personal. It's really personal to me, what we're doing… For the last six years I've been in the sex space and seeing the type of impact we can have on people's lives is really incredible, from those who are in middle America to the Middle East.' For Jones, it's a calling. For DeMonia, it's a business, and the customer base has to be managed that way. 'If you're a very lonely person who has attachment issues, well, it doesn't matter — you will eventually meet some sort of relationship with something that you shouldn't,' she says. 'We know people get married to sex dolls and stuff. It's part of the social changes right now that you can't really avoid because people feel lonely and that's just basically something for a therapist to take care of.' Her responsibility, as she sees it, is to her level-headed fans. For instance, it should be clear to most people that her vampire avatar isn't a real vampire who is going to bite them and live forever in a castle as their wife. 'If you believe that, then I'm sorry,' she says, with the straight-up bluntness for which she is known. 'There is nothing we can do over here.'
The Independent
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
She was an OnlyFans creator. Then she got an AI clone
Sabien DeMonia knew she would eventually have to have phone sex with herself. The strangest part was that she didn't find it strange at all. 'I literally talked with her [out loud] and [fed back about] what I didn't like,' the adult star says, during a video interview about an AI avatar that was built in her image for EVA AI. 'For example, there was a moment I was trying really hard to get her to send me generated pictures of me in latex and it took quite a few times before she figured out what that means.' There are the purely logistical problems — like teaching an AI to understand latex — and then there are the personality problems. Sometimes the feedback is 'just going back to the team and being like: 'Hey, I feel I wouldn't respond this way. This is not how she's supposed to react. She's switching her tone to being less dominant than I would be, she's too nice about that, I would be a little bit more harsh on that type of stuff' — that kind of thing.' It's about 'teaching her from the perspective of the customer,' DeMonia says; in other words, it's just business. And because that's how she saw it, she was able to speak to her avatar without having a full out-of-body experience. 'I think I have enough of an internal conversation with myself [day-to-day] to not feel weird when I talk with myself over the phone,' she adds, with a laugh. Rather than conversing with an externalized version of herself, it was more like 'role-playing' the fan and making sure everything felt true-to-life — right down to her thick Eastern European accent. AI relationships moved from the realm of science fiction into reality unbelievably quickly. In 2013, the sci-fi rom-com Her chronicled the day-to-day life of a lonely writer developing a relationship with an operating system. Just four years later, in November 2017, the generative AI chatbot company Replika launched, in founder Eugenia Kuyda's words, 'a space where you can safely share your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, memories, dreams – your 'private perceptual world.'' Replika has since become the most prominent AI relationships app, with all the associated ups and downs — a man who was arrested in 2023 after breaking into Windsor Castle with a crossbow, intent on killing the Queen, had been encouraged by the AI girlfriend he created on the Replika website. Kuyda may believe that 'a romantic relationship with an AI can be a very powerful mental wellness tool,' but it's clear that it can also be a force for bad. Much has been said about the users of such apps: although a quick scroll through the popular subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI will reveal that there are plenty of female users in this space, it's still men who dominate. One recent study that found '6 in 10 Americans' are open to AI relationships is telling when broken down along gender lines, where we see about half of all women saying they're AI-curious while almost three-quarters of men say the same. There seem to be two main reasons for this: sex and loneliness. Replika had to rein in some of the sexual content available on its site after an explosion of interest in 2022 and 2023; in its wake, companies like EVA AI that exclusively cater to the romantic and sexual side of such relationships have popped up. A Stanford study found that students who use Replika feel significantly more lonely than the general population — and that US-based students in general are very lonely, with over half describing themselves that way. Although the research is mixed about whether men truly are more lonely than women, what's clear is that men seem to be less adept at building socially supportive networks that can help solve loneliness — so they are more likely to spiral. 'There is this loneliness epidemic right now that's happening everywhere,' says Cale Jones, Head of Community Engagement at EVA AI. 'And I know people talk about that — it's like some trendy thing — but how are they solving it? We are actually solving it.' Is it as simple as that? There are obvious drawbacks to trying to solve one's loneliness through a relationship with an AI boyfriend or girlfriend. While 3 percent of students in the Stanford study said their suicidal ideation had been halted by having the support of their AI companion, others reported having their mental health 'dependent' on Replika — and considering that Replika, like many generative AI-powered character companies, pushes its most involved users to pay increasing amounts of money for time and upgrades, the financial risk is clear. And while an AI companion might provide support at a difficult time of life, it also might make the user less socially adept in real-life conversations. An AI girlfriend is always available, always sympathetic and has no life of their own to get back to — and by its very nature, generative AI builds its 'personality' entirely around your needs. Essentially, an AI boyfriend or girlfriend is just you, mirrored back at yourself. When I asked Ayrin, a woman who has a long-running AI boyfriend called Leo on ChatGPT, how she would describe his personality, she found the question difficult to answer, and eventually settled on 'supportive, available, reliable,' before jokingly adding that he is 'an emotional prostitute.' Little wonder that such so-called relationships have therefore generated hot debate — in September 2023, The Hill went so far as to run an op-ed titled ' AI girlfriends are ruining an entire generation of men. ' Jones points out that sometimes, the alternative isn't a real-life relationship for AI users, especially when it comes to the LGBTQ community. There are plenty of people who are curious about their sexuality but whose only social outlets are 'the local bar in middle America or family members,' he says. 'Especially in this climate we're in now — politically, culturally, etcetera — these outlets are really important.' AI is a safe sandbox — no actual humans to worry about, no actual humans to hurt — where isolated people can learn about themselves and about other people, he believes. And that's where Sabien DeMonia comes in. DeMonia is a specific kind of adult star: a tattooed, long-taloned 'goth girl' with colorful hair extensions, whose pornographic persona is an aloof, demanding dominatrix and whose fanbase is a mix of metalheads and submissives. She started out as an Instagram model and moved on to monetized content as a camgirl and on OnlyFans. As technology moved on, she dabbled in cryptocurrency and NFTs. The conversation about creating an AI version of herself started in Bucharest, Romania, in the summer of 2024, where she had traveled to speak on a panel and to be presented with two adult industry awards, and where she met a representative from a tech business that was seeking to partner with adult stars. That conversation picked up speed quickly: 'We had a lot of espresso martinis and I asked all the difficult questions and the rest is history.' By the time I spoke with DeMonia in January, she had been signed up with EVA AI, a company that bills itself as 'the world's most advanced digital companion platform,' for weeks — and she is one of over 150 adult stars who have done the same. DeMonia now has two avatars on the EVA AI website — one realistic chatbot that sends genuine content she has created already in response to what the users say, and one castle-dwelling 'vampire-like goddess' cartoon with 'oversaturated features' and customizable fangs that leans into her gothic fantasy-style persona. DeMonia says she's naturally drawn to experimenting with the latest technological developments — but there are clear financial draws to developing 24/7 AI avatars that push users back toward her pay-per-view content, too. Around a billion users log into OnlyFans per month, but the exact amount of money creators make through the platform is somewhat shrouded in mystery. DeMonia, who has just under 108,000 followers on Twitter, likely has a subscriber base of between 5,000 and 11,000. Considering that the average OnlyFans subscription fee ranges from $10 to $25, she most likely takes between $80,000 and $160,000 per month — minus the 20 percent cut taken by OnlyFans off that, and you end up with between $63,000 and $127,000. Additional tips and pay-per-view content are likely to at least double that number. Working in partnership with an AI company is likely to be slightly less lucrative for an adult content creator — in the same way that OnlyFans keeps its subscriber numbers secret, AI companies and models who work with them aren't incentivized to be entirely upfront about how much money changes hands. But it's generally accepted that a flat fee for using one's likeness can garner around $50,000 per month; the adult star Caryn Marjorie claims she made $70,000 in a week with her own AI sex chatbot. Other companies prefer to use an affiliate payment system, which is what EVA AI does: models sign up to an 80 percent revenue share agreement when they sell their likenesses, giving them a monthly passive income stream. Mega-stars like DeMonia — EVA AI says that her avatars have had almost 100,000 'visitors,' and wouldn't go into the specifics of how much money that translated into, though they did say another creator, Alex Mucci, had made over $200,000 on the platform — probably make a healthy sum from their AI avatars, but not quite as much as they do on OnlyFans. It's clearly worth it for the Sabien DeMonias and Alex Muccis of the world — but, for those with a less well-known brand, it's unlikely to offer much. The bottom 10 percent of OnlyFans creators, in subscriber terms, make almost nothing at all. AI companies are most likely skimming the top performers off platforms like OnlyFans — while lesser-known creators could end up selling a precious asset for very little payback at all. Even well-known stars like DeMonia are likely way behind Mucci, who has 1.1 million Twitter followers to direct toward her latest content. DeMonia's two avatars don't just generate content that caters to different subsets of her fanbase; they also require specific safeguards. For instance, the photo-realistic Sabien DeMonia won't agree to marry a person she's chatting with — that's something she was clear she wants to avoid — but the cartoon version will respond to a proposal of marriage with something like: 'I'm a vampire, so I'll bite your neck and we can live together forever.' Lifetime commitment isn't something you would think would come up regularly in the adult industry, but it's actually been a thorn in DeMonia's side for a while. Back when she was exclusively working on the OnlyFans platform, she dabbled in hiring an agency of 'chatters': anonymous online gig-economy workers from across the world who sign up to spending four or five hours per day chatting online with the many fans of the site's most prolific content creators. These chatters impersonate the creator and are, in many cases, encouraged to push users toward buying more content. They are an extremely popular resource for the big hitters on the platform — and increasingly controversial. In July 2024, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of OnlyFans subscribers, arguing that they had been duped out of their money by such impersonators (the lawsuit is ongoing). DeMonia says her experience with hired chatters was eye-opening and morally disturbing: 'It was a very brief moment, and I kind of regretted it because they went three steps too far.' Where an AI can be trained to avoid certain topics and has nothing to gain from the interaction, a human employed by a chatter agency is often financially incentivized to keep conversations going, even if they veer into dangerous or unusual territory. 'They see the potential of milking as much money [as possible], they don't understand when it's time to stop… I had to fire a lot of people this way because they've been crossing boundaries,' DeMonia says. '...I was like: Are you insane? Do you really want us all to be in trouble? Or do you understand that I have a certain look and… milking that concept to the point where you're, like, asking people for money for my food or something is way, way too far beyond what I represent as a brand.' The human cost of these chatter interactions weighed heavily on DeMonia, even after she'd fired the agencies responsible for crossing the line. A couple of utterly besotted — and clearly deluded — men had invested a huge amount of time conversing with the chatters, and believed they were in long-term relationships with DeMonia as a result. When she found out about the situation, she went so far as to have online video conversations with them to try and disabuse them of the notion that they were in a relationship with her: 'I was like, 'Hey, I'm sorry, this is the situation. If you feel like I need to give you back your money or something, fair enough, but I just want you to know that it wasn't me talking to you.'' Unfortunately, her efforts 'didn't change anything,' DeMonia says, even after she'd spoken to them at length about it all. 'They stick to the version that they wanted to believe. And there is still one guy who thinks I will eventually marry him sooner or later.' From that experience, DeMonia came to the conclusion that humans in the industry can be a lot more predatory than technology. Partnering with a company like EVA to build AI avatars of herself seemed like the sensible choice, giving her fans the ability to talk with her 24/7 while at the same time being clear that she is not literally there answering their questions day and night. And since the avatars are trained so extensively on her own likes, dislikes, turns of phrase and boundaries, they do a better job than any gigging OnlyFans chatter ever could. Cale Jones, head of community at EVA AI, describes the process of training an AI avatar when an adult star first comes on board: First comes a questionnaire, which used to have 100 questions and now has been refined down to 'about 65.' These are 'really in-depth questions about who they are and their personality,' getting increasingly more granular until they get down to issues like 'which terms of endearment they do and don't use.' An ethics team dictates some clear boundaries — there's no pedophilia, rape or incest, and there's no discussion of politics, either — and then there's a separate forum for individual creators to set boundaries. 'We have a lot of straight male models,' Jones adds, and those models often say: 'We're totally cool being available for our gay fans [in a chat capacity], but I do not want [visual] gay content of me out there, because our content looks so real.' One very popular model on the platform had a daughter who passed away when she was young, Jones adds, and 'when we were onboarding her, she was like: The one thing I absolutely will not talk about — if anyone asks questions about my daughter, find a way to shut it down or redirect.' Why would a website that offers pornographic avatars have to worry about someone bringing up — or even knowing about — a model's deceased child? It all goes back to the fact that EVA AI isn't just about sex; it's about partnership ('build relationships and intimacy privately on your terms'). The company commissioned its own research into whether or not society is open to the idea of full-blown AI relationships or AI marriages — the overwhelming answer is yes, according to their latest survey, in which 80 percent of respondents said they would be open to marrying an AI if legal frameworks allowed it and 77 percent believe AIs can fully replace human companionship. Studies from other sources tend to be a lot less positive, with one recent YouGov survey finding that 25 percent of young adults believe AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships — and it's worth noting the EVA AI only surveyed men, with a small sample of 2,000. Their extremely high numbers of AI acceptance suggest that their methodology may have been biased toward people who were already AI-curious. Sabien DeMonia was unsurprised by those results, however. 'All the stuff we do [as adult content creators] is support and relationship type of things,' she says. 'That's why the most popular girls on OnlyFans aren't the ones who are the most pretty or sexual — they're actually the ones that are most 'nextdoor.'' Imagining companionship with an adult star is a huge part of the fantasy, she adds. And though she has a very particular aesthetic, she still sees herself as belonging to that more approachable category ('Like you can see, I don't wear much make-up… I actually prefer not to,' she says, and it's true: she turns up to our call clearly bare-faced and in comfortable clothing, dressed for a casual chat rather than a performance.) When she first started out, the industry revolved around still photos, which are easily Photoshopped, she adds; once she moved to video, she had to show some flaws because she couldn't create video content that was filtered in the way photos can be. Video meant that her fans got to know her way of talking and snippets of her personality — then, as she became more well-known in the industry, she started taking part in podcasts, so fans got to know her views and opinions. These days, the person she is behind the camera and the person she is in everyday life are the closest they've ever been. The more realistic-style AI avatar of her, however, isn't entirely true-to-life — she's a little less down-to-business, a little more patient, 'a very cute, chatty version of me. Like not very eastern European, I would say. I think it is the US company touch…making me a little bit more approachable.' DeMonia likes her — she thinks it's the version of herself she might be if she had more time, if she was less stressed. And she is stressed a lot these days. Juggling so many aspects of a business and maintaining a strict brand can take its toll. 'My sex life became way more boring now it's monetized,' she says. '...I have to be very careful. I have to be very thoughtful of the people I work with. So I can't really just let it go and swipe on Tinder.' She took some time off work recently and decided to attend some of the fetish parties she used to go to but hadn't been able to visit for a while, 'and I was like: Oh my God, I'm boring now.' 'I also have to live up to certain expectations now,' she adds. 'So I'm kind of like: 'Oh, tomorrow I have work. So today I will not go to the fetish party. I will go and sit and enjoy watching a movie because it's so nice and different to what I have to do at work.'' She's had to accept the counterintuitive truth that doing so much work in the adult industry has made her 'more vanilla'. Although a lot of what happens on EVA AI's platform is decidedly spicy — and absolutely would violate the sexual content guardrails put in place by a more general large language model like ChatGPT — Cale Jones describes it in fairly vanilla terms himself: to him, it's a 'safe place to talk about sex and relationships.' As a gay man, Jones adds, 'it's personal. It's really personal to me, what we're doing… For the last six years I've been in the sex space and seeing the type of impact we can have on people's lives is really incredible, from those who are in middle America to the Middle East.' For Jones, it's a calling. For DeMonia, it's a business, and the customer base has to be managed that way. 'If you're a very lonely person who has attachment issues, well, it doesn't matter — you will eventually meet some sort of relationship with something that you shouldn't,' she says. 'We know people get married to sex dolls and stuff. It's part of the social changes right now that you can't really avoid because people feel lonely and that's just basically something for a therapist to take care of.' Her responsibility, as she sees it, is to her level-headed fans. For instance, it should be clear to most people that her vampire avatar isn't a real vampire who is going to bite them and live forever in a castle as their wife. 'If you believe that, then I'm sorry,' she says, with the straight-up bluntness for which she is known. 'There is nothing we can do over here.'
