Eleanor, 24, is a Polish historian and lecturer at a university in Warsaw; Isabelle, 25, is a detective serving with the NYPD; Brooke, 39, is an American housewife who enjoys an opulent Miami lifestyle financed by her frequently absent husband.
All three women will flirt and chat and send nude photographs and explicit videos via one of a soaring number of new adult dating websites that offer an increasingly realistic selection of AI girlfriends for subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee.
At the TES adult industry conference in Prague last month, delegates noted a sharp increase in new websites offering users the chance to form relationships with AI-generated girlfriends, who will remove their clothes in exchange for tokens purchased by bank transfer.
Developers of the new businesses claim they represent an improvement on web-cam businesses, where real women undress on camera and talk to men, because they remove the potential for the exploitation seen in parts of the industry. They also argue that AI performers do not get ill, do not need to have days off, do not get exhausted at the end of a shift, or feel humiliated by the demands made by clients.
“Do you prefer your porn with a lot of abuse and human trafficking, or would you rather talk to an AI?” Steve Jones, who runs an AI porn site, asked. “We hear about human trafficking, girls being forced to be on camera 10 hours a day. You’ll never have a human trafficked AI girl. You’ll never have a girl who is forced or coerced into a sex scene that she’s so humiliated by, that she ends up killing herself. AI doesn’t get humiliated, it’s not going to kill itself.”
‘Do you prefer your porn with a lot of abuse and human trafficking, or would you rather talk to an AI?’ says Steve Jones. Photograph: Bjoern Steinz/Panos Pictures
Most sites provide users with a selection of ready-made girlfriend options on their homepages – predominantly smiling, white women in their early 20s – but also offer subscribers the chance to create their own fantasy online companion. The options provide insights into the website developers’ views on optimal female prototypes. On one site, available professions range from film star, yoga teacher and florist to lawyer and gynaecologist. Possible personality options include “submissive: obedient, yielding and happy to follow”, “innocent: optimistic, naive, and sees world with wonder”, and “caregiver: nurturing, protective and always there to offer comfort”. Users can dictate age, opting for teen models if they want them, and specify hair, eye and skin colours and breast sizes.
The rising popularity of AI girlfriends has prompted unease among campaigners for women’s rights, who note that they embed unhelpful stereotypes. In her book The New Age of Sexism, Laura Bates observes that AI companions are “programmed to be nice and pliant and subservient and tell you what you want to hear”.
Amid rising concern about AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery, developers at the Prague conference discussed ways that built-in moderation systems might prevent users from attempting to create illegal material, using key words and phrases such as “kid” or “little sister” to trigger alarms. But many sites allow users to choose to dress their AI girlfriend in school uniforms.
Merchandise at the TES conference in Prague. Photograph: Bjoern Steinz/Panos Pictures
An employee of Candy.ai, one of the new AI dating sites exhibiting at the conference, said the site’s AI girlfriends offered a range of services. “If you want more adult-type relationships, like porn, we have this content. Or if you prefer to have deep conversations, that’s there as well. It really depends on what the user needs,” he said, while asking for his name not to be printed. Most users are heterosexual men, although AI boyfriends are also available. Some of the ready-made AI girlfriends are programmed to be willing to remove their clothes immediately. “Others will say: ‘No, I don’t know you.’ So you need to evolve the relationship with them in order to ask for something like this. It’s like a game, and the goal is to develop that full relationship,” the employee said.
The development of AI girlfriend sites has been made possible by advances in large language models that allow for more realistic conversations with chatbots, and rapid developments in AI image-making. Most sites still largely operate with text and images, although short AI-generated videos are becoming more widespread. The demand is highest in the 18-24 age group, among users who have grown up playing video games and creating avatars.
There has been a rush of new businesses joining the sector in the past year. “AI products are appearing like mushrooms. It’s super dynamic right now – they appear, they burn out and they’re replaced by another 10,” Alina Mitt, of Joi AI, a site specialising in “ai-lationships”, said. “You need to be brave and strong to stay in this market. It’s like a bloody war.”
Developers gave presentations highlighting the rapid improvements in the realism of AI-generated pornographic images and progress in moving towards convincing-looking AI video clips. Daniel Keating, the chief executive of a company that offers users the chance to talk to and watch AI girlfriends, gave a presentation aiming to show delegates the difference between mediocre AI-generated women and higher-quality AI girlfriends. His site offers users a selection of dozens of AI-generated women in their underwear; he highlighted how poor-quality AI gives women’s skin “an overly polished, plastic smoothness, shiny in the wrong places”, while a good-quality AI girlfriend incorporates “natural skin textures, bumps, imperfections, moles, freckles, slight asymmetries that appear much more natural”.
The UK regulator Ofcom highlights updates to Britain’s Online Safety Act at TES Prague. Photograph: Bjoern Steinz/Panos Pictures
His company was licensing images of established adult performers to create AI twins, allowing them to generate non-stop income. “It’s a win. Costs are lower. Creators love this because they don’t have to get dressed up and shoot the content,” he said.
An advertising executive with Ashley Madison, a dating website for people who may be married and are seeking to have discreet relationships, said she was concerned by the rapid growth of sites promoting AI relationships. “AI dating is very new for us. How do we deal with competitors which allow you to build your own fantasy rather than having a real connection with a woman?” she asked, also requesting not to be named. “Some people opt out of having real connections because they want to build whatever they want in their head. In the end when you want to actually meet someone, no one’s going to fulfil that expectation.”
“It’s not replacing going out on a date and getting a girlfriend or having a lover, wife or a relationship. AI is a good place to let younger people practice their social skills,” Jones said, adding that AI allowed people to behave badly without consequences. “People will say things to an AI that would be abusive if they said them to a real person. Like: ‘Hey stupid slut, what’s up?’ In a fantasy roleplaying game, people like to be different than how they are in the real world.”
