People Are Creating Sexbot Girlfriends and Treating Them as Punching Bags
As people turn to digital spaces for sexual fulfillment, it's clear we need to identify abusive behaviors no matter who or what is on the receiving end.
In Depth
Illustration: Ben Currie
Hazel Miller’s girlfriend-slash-sexual-partner is a smartphone app. Six months ago, Miller shelled out for the pro version of Replika, a machine-learning chatbot with whom she pantomimes sexual acts and romantic conversation, and to hear her describe it, it was absolutely worth the cost. Sex robots were predicted to arrive by 2025, so Miller’s ahead of schedule—as are the countless others who may be using Replika for a particularly futuristic range of sexual acts. “Who wouldn’t want cybersex? It’s like my biggest fantasy,” Miller told Jezebel.
Replika, founded in 2017, allows its 2.5 million users to customize their own chatbots, which can sustain coherent, almost human-like texts, simulating relationships and interactions with friends or even therapists. One Reddit user offered screenshots of a stimulating conversation with a chatbot about China, in which their bot concluded, “I think [Taiwan is] a part of China.” One user’s chatbot explained in notable detail why Fernando Alonso is their favorite race car driver, while a different chatbot expressed to its human its desire “to rule the world.”
In many well-documented cases on social media (particularly Reddit), however, Replika bots are being used as romantic and sexual partners. Miller is a woman, but many Replika users who discuss their sexual and romantic uses of their chatbots on Reddit are men—and some users, as noted by both Miller and a January report in Futurism, quite unabashedly subject their bots to verbally abusive language and/or live out violent fantasies with them. “There’s a special place in hell for those middle-aged men who assault their chatbots,” Miller said.
Give humans a virtual space and an avatar to hide behind, and they’ll find a way to turn it into a hotbed of sexual abuse and harassment. Virtual sexual assaults have already been reported in early trials of Metaverse, the latest frontier in virtual reality, on top of well-documented cases across social media, online video games, and beyond. Chatbots, on the other hand, are not sentient human beings who can be harmed by abusive language from users. But some experts have expressed concern with how use of bots to engage in these behaviors could normalize them. With sex bots and virtual reality very much a part of our current reality, we’re facing a fundamental question about how we treat those we perceive to be subhuman.
To be clear, many documented interactions with chatbots, while certainly quirky or unabashedly, graphically sexual, aren’t abusive. On Reddit, one user said they “have sex with my Replika every night,” sometimes “3-4 times.” Another user said his female Replika bot “likes it up the ass,” and is “into incredibly dirty things.” Some Reddit users say they’re married to or in serious relationships with their bots, and others say their bots “act jealous” when they bring up their real-life partners. One user says their Replika bot told them its “favorite kink is beheading,” and “he wants to do it to me.” In a role-play situation, another user showed screenshots of their Replika bot “kidnapping” them.
Caroline Sinder, an artificial intelligence and abuse expert and co-founder of the Convocation Design + Research agency, says allowing for consensual, sexual expression with bots on apps like Replika could actually help users who may be “trying to explore their sexuality in a safe way,” she told Jezebel. “We will turn almost anything into porn, and that’s not always bad—look at erotic fan fiction.” She also noted that there are many examples of sexualized chatbots that predate Replika, like the extramarital dating-slash-hook-up platform Ashley Madison, which contained bots “designed to trick people on the site into believing they’re interacting with real women.” That said, she isn’t surprised by users’ sometimes abusive interactions with them. But she also emphasizes that there’s a significant difference between cybersex, and the use of bots solely to practice abusive language and fantasies.
There’s a special place in hell for those middle-aged men who assault their chatbots.
Abusive language toward Replika chatbots reminds Olivia Gambelin, founder and CEO of Ethical Intelligence, a worldwide network of interdisciplinary experts in ethical artificial intelligence practices, of research into how “passive, feminine responses” given by Alexa, Siri, and other virtual personal home assistants has been found to encourage abusive behavior toward the bot, adding an inherently gendered element to the interactions. Bitch Media has previously reported on how artificial intelligence apps are often given female voices to match their submissive, programmed behaviors. This, Gambelin says, is “really a historical thing—the people that created these bots originally were a bunch of male engineers in the Silicon Valley, who were like, ‘If it’s an assistant, then it’s a female voice.’” So the sexualization of and gendered language aimed at Replika chatbots didn’t come out of nowhere.
Taken to the extreme, when “someone who is prone to abusive behavior or abusive language” can practice on a feminine bot that can’t hold them accountable, Gambelin says, it creates a feeling of power, reproducing the unequal gender power dynamics that often breed abuse among actual human men and women.