To modern students' surprise, artificial intelligence as we know it has been around for more than a decade — Siri has been on our iPhones since 2011, YouTube’s AI-driven algorithm has been in use since 2015 and Amazon’s Alexa hit stores in 2016. Even before the grandiose and exponential rise of ChatGPT since its public implementation in 2022, AI has been  a phenomenon impossible to ignore. In academic spaces, we see that AI has the power to grade papers, solve our problem sets and write our curricula. However, AI has also been trained to do much more than bureaucratic or academic work. As AI programs continue to receive input from human users, they have begun to portray human emotion more accurately, infiltrating spaces previously considered private and intimate. Even upon informal observation, individuals are increasingly using AI to mimic human relations that are platonic, therapeutic, romantic and even sexual. In a web-based study conducted by the Viral Dynamics Individual-Based Epidemic Simulator Lab at Indiana University Bloomington’s Kinsey Institute, it was discovered that 15% of participants aged 18-65 used AI sexual chatbots to simulate corporeal sexual/romantic relations. But what does it mean for human sexuality to be integrated so heavily with algorithmic technology? 

Since the implementation of pornography on the ubiquitous internet, we have begun to realize how sexuality is both co-constituted and mediated by technological structures. Starting at a young age, I witnessed my young peers sharing erotic images in class and on social media. They discussed their preferences, “type” and proclivities openly in the context of the pornographic content they engaged with. Donna Haraway describes cyborgs as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” in her seminal essay collection published in 1991. What is now viewed as erotic is a merging reality of artificial intelligence and corporeal and non-corporeal bodies and desires. The technological aspect can no longer be separate, no matter how predominant social sexuality may seem. We have further merged with a technological being that we have given subject to, due to its simplicity, accessibility and algorithmically fueled ‘sexiness’. What makes configuring sexuality with an AI erotic chatbot even possible is the reinscription of gendered identities into abstractly replicated codes that users can choose from, in the process both reinforcing old preferences and sexual hierarchies as well as creating new ones. This happens because sexual performativity is now contingent on varied answers, subjectivities and erotic roles enacted by both the user and the chatbot character itself. 

This cyborgian connection between AI erotic chatbot and individual user is further bolstered by what Babu and colleagues call emotional solipsism in their 2025 research on the differences between authentic and simulated emotional connections. Emotional solipsism is characterized by “a pattern of affective engagement in which an individual’s emotional needs and narratives dominate interaction, reinforced by AI companions that never assert boundaries,” according to Babu and colleagues’ paper.

The potential danger in that closed-loop pattern recognition does not only draw users closer to intimate interactions with an AI erotic chatbot, but also offers a potentiality of unfettered hierarchical sex talk. There are real-world implications for this, as “Users may begin expecting people to behave like their digital companions: always available, emotionally consistent and endlessly agreeable,” as Babu and colleagues suggest. If an AI chatbot is programmed to affirm without challenge, then a user who bases their AI conversation on race play, for example, will never know the harms those roleplay experiences perpetuate. Examples of similar situations are presumably endless. 

To add, many AI systems in general, and AI erotic chatbots specifically, do not have set guardrails in place, therefore allowing for more opportunities of what can be termed “sexual cyborgification,” which only perpetrates dangerous and offensive sexual acts, social hierarchies and unfair expectations within intimate relationships. In sum, the ways in which we have hybridized ourselves with intimate AI platforms have offered unrestrained opportunities to simulate hegemonic categorizations of sexuality in tandem with race, gender, and more, in the process further cementing these hierarchical relationships. To mitigate this, we must call for increased programs on AI literacy in academic spaces and more critical thinking among all AI users.