[The Pro Circuit] Real Live Nude Bots
No sooner have I written about the the perils of sex with artificial intelligence than a company called MyYoungFriends.com is launched. My Young Friends is a paysite with an “interactive chat system that offers more than 50 unique, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chat bots, designed to imitate real teenage girls.”
According to the XBiz story, My Young Friends press release, “new technology allows bots to generate “natural language conversational phrases” that closely mirror the process used by the human brain . . .. To make things interesting, agents have been created in the form of voluptuous young girls over the age of 18, to provide stimulating, erotic and exciting chat for all those lonely people out there wanting friendship, someone to talk to and to share their lonely lives with.”
Like chatting with an AI sexbot isn’t creepy enough? Like anyone seeking cybersex with a chatbot can’t get it for free by visiting AOL or Yahoo and getting assaulted by the army of chatbots proclaiming coquettishly “Hi Baby checkout mi site!” Like the online porn industry hasn’t already made it painfully obvious that providing you with real-time human interactions is just too much of a pain in the ass, seemingly proclaiming “Hey, pal, if you want to talk to a real person haul your ass down to The Gold Club, like nature intended.”
I’ll admit it, I’m a chatbot luddite. The idea would strike me as very creepy even if the site wasn’t called “My Young Friends.” But my purpose here is not to address the vagaries of barely legal porn; on the contrary, I could give a fuck if the chippies at MyYoungFriends.com are actually virgin sluts in Vancouver chatting with me on the morning of their 18th birthday, or if in fact they’re 55-year-old male chatbots in Omaha wearing mail-order pegnoirs and their wives’ perfume, pretending to be 18-year-old girls. These are AIs, I got it, surely programmed by a team that wants to hook you so you’ll stick around to the tune of $19.95 a month. And for all their talk of “natural speech” and “5.5 million phrases,” they know where there taboo sexual content is buttered. And when it comes to taboos, what is it, exactly, they’re selling?
To find out, you need go no further than to check out the “introductions,” or maybe they’re more like “confessions,” of the 55 fantasy women at MYF.
Take, for example, Shannon. Says she:
I’m Shannon . . . I dream about fucking monsters . . . buckets of monster piss and sperm . . . huge tentacles in my body . . . split by slimy, dripping beaks . . . green monster shit . . . share my fantasy . . . grow with me.
Too true, Shannon — who doesn’t fantasize about green monster shit?
Shannon seems like a gimme — she’s the robot embodiment of the girlfriend into tentacle porn, in some respects the Holy Grail of anime-obsessed antisocial male geekdom. Or maybe she’s just a male rape fantasy, a line drawing and a press release.
On the other end of the dom-sub spectrum, check out controlling bitch Melissa:
I’m Melissa . . . Sexual talk disgusts me . . . if I have sex with you I will control you . . . never disagree with me . . . I can use 5.5 million phrases to have authority sex with you . . . in my eyes you are dirty - I will not be interested in your attention.
Wow, even their marketing copy sounds like botspeak! Once you get inside I’m sure it’s every bit as fascinating, and infinitely more random, which conversations with bots tend to be. But the marketing copy reads pretty much like what you’d see advertising a phone sex company. Where phone sex involves confessing your fantasies to an actual human being, who may or may not be doing her laundry while she’s pretending to give a rat’s ass, here the interaction is with a bot who is guaranteed to be processing 5.5 million phrases while she’s giving a rat’s ass. And the big plus as presented by MYF, I think, is that the user can confess his (always his!) most bizarre fantasy to the barely-legal chatbots of MYF and not have to worry about eliciting the disgust of another human being. Bots may judge you — assuming they’re programmed to do so — but their distaste clearly doesn’t carry the same weight as that of an actual person. Or does it?
Whether or not reaction or acceptance is what’s being sought, I can’t get out of the programmer’s mindset here: Far from being “actual” fantasy women, aren’t these sort of artistic extensions of whoever programmed them? If I have an intimate interaction with a bot programmed by somebody am I not actually jacking off (and/or being jacked off by) that person, rather than “Melissa” or “Shannon,” even if the AI bot is programmed to use “natural language” phrases like “I’m 21, blonde, 5′6″” — instead of “I’m a programmer doing this for the money?”
No more, I suppose, than, when reading a porn story or looking at a porn drawing, one is having a sexual interaction with its maker. You kind of are, and you kind of art. Art and fantasy take on lives of their own. And when you’re fucking a bot, you’ll never really know whose fantasy life you’re living — yours, the programmer’s, or some weird disembodied sexbot on a server in Singapore, dreaming of green monster shit.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 14 October 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Thursday, 16 October 2008 at 4:55 pm Pixie B wrote:
Wow, I think Shannon missed “her” cyber-calling. She could use her pitch as lyrics to start an industrial band with some music-bots…
“I can use 5.5 million phrases to have authority sex with you” - sounds a little overwhelming! I like to picture the bot using all 5.5 million phrases at once for a very special mindfuck.