The growth of porn-fuelled ‘AI girlfriends’ is far from harmless to women
Artificial intelligence seems to be growing ever more prevalent in society. Programs like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and others are being increasingly used for everyday tasks, from planning holidays to checking grammar, but a darker side is threatening families.
Open AI has announced that from December, ChatGPT will allow adults to generate erotic content as part of its approach to “treat adult users like adults”. But why should the UK’s most popular AI tool join the porn industry in distorting men’s view of women?
No dangers?
At The European Summit’s recent adult industry marketing conference, one owner of an AI pornography website boasted that ‘AI girlfriends’ can even have many advantages.
“You’ll never have a human trafficked AI girl”, Steven Jones claimed. “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.”
But these words show little understanding of the real impact of the online world. Online pornography has been linked to copycat behaviours such as the normalisation of non-fatal strangulation, and desensitisation towards watching child sex abuse.
Given that users of pornography tend to view more graphic and explicit material over time, it is naïve to think that users of AI pornography would not soon seek out pornography involving real women, or prostitutes willing to indulge their fantasies.
Both pornography and prostitution fuel human trafficking. So the claim that AI pornography has no victims is to ignore its clear trajectory towards a deeply exploitative and abusive industries.
Degrading women
Engaging with pornographic AI ‘girlfriends’, even though they are not real people, will inevitably impact the perception of ‘acceptable’ behaviour at home. The most common users of such chatbots are men between 18 and 24 years old; even if such men do not push their sexual partners into pornographic roleplay, what of the impact on the women themselves?
Women may become neglected or made to feel inferior, while men, behind closed doors, engage in sexual-like behaviours with an AI chatbot of their ideal age, appearance and body shape down to the last detail, who will gladly participate in any conceivable sexual act in the way real women would not. Such insecurities already drive young women to engage in degrading sexual behaviours they don’t wish to participate in for fear their boyfriend will leave them for someone who will. Adding AI ‘girlfriends’ to the equation will only exacerbate this.
Instead of encouraging such behaviour, developers should be standing up for women and families by denouncing the impact of pornography on society. Women are not bodies to be objectified or thrown away in the face of rapidly expanding technology.
AI pornography, like all pornography, is damaging for the men who use it and society which suffers the fallout. It also remains sinful – lusting after AI-arranged computer pixels is still lust.
Let us end this runaway train before the list of victims continues to grow. And let us return to a society where it is universally understood and accepted that the only proper place for sex is within the marriage of one man and one woman for life.