Girl on the Net

Cast your mind back to the last time something gave you a kick of surprising new lust. You know what I mean, right? The little moments during sex when someone said something with a particular intonation and it caused you to melt from the inside. The written erotica that made just a few tweaks to the kind of phrases you think about when you masturbate, and suddenly opened the door to a whole new avenue of fantasy. Maybe you were scrolling through your favourite porn site, and you discovered a fresh way to position two subs for a beating that gave you… well… feelings. Cast your mind back to how you felt when you were last turned on by something that surprised you. Now hold that thought, and treasure it: it may be much rarer in the future.

I’ve definitely scoffed before about the idea that we might use AI to write porn. I even tested Chat GPT out just after it launched, because I’d seen so many people herald it as The Answer To Everything/The End Of It All. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. So I asked it to write a sex blog post and its answers were pretty crap. Part of the problem back then (lol ‘back then’ was only 3 years ago) was that it still had all the ‘no adult content’ guardrails up. One of the most consistent things about our hellish capitalist dystopia is that companies need advertising revenue, and to keep payment providers like Visa and Mastercard happy, so they’ll usually shy away from having their robot describe a juicy pair of tits.

Not so these days! Now there are robots who’d be more than happy to describe a juicy pair of tits, then sext you as if you’re fondling them right this minute. AI boyfriend/girlfriend companies are now one of the most common spammy presences in my inbox. They want me to advertise the latest version of their slutty, obsequious, make-you-feel-good machine. This machine, for a low low price, will pretend to be your partner and send you lovely little messages throughout the day, or just when you’re logged on and horny, or… well, whenever you want! It’s a robot! The beauty of robots is they do what they’re told.

You know who won’t do what they’re told? People! It’s actually one of the things that’s really cool about them. People are surprising. They have emotions which are often wildly irrational and entirely unpredictable (even to them). Their response to simple questions will be influenced by their mood, the time of day, whether they’ve recently eaten, and every other interaction they’ve had with you or other people in the past. The fact that each human being contains so many possibilities they may as well be infinite is one of the things that makes them so fucking special. The more we learn and grow, the more potential each one of us has to surprise and delight and arouse.

It’s this uniqueness that I’m trying to find when I commission guest blogs and audio porn from other human people.

AI is constantly invading my space

I get really frustrated by the AI companies who think I want to shout about their crappy products. Why would I celebrate robots that pretend to be people in order to trick real people into pissing their precious love up into The Cloud?! But it’s not just these companies, AI gets everywhere: I have also received guest blog pitches from people who I suspect might be using AI to write their porn. I have had requests to record audio of stories that have been written by AI. And now I get blog comments written by AI too.

I’m going to show you one here, because it illustrates precisely why I despise AI and do not want it anywhere near my sex blog. It was left on a recent post I wrote about missing someone:

“There’s something so resonant about the kind of missing you describe here — not frantic or lusty, but steady and warm, like a low hum in the background of everything. It’s a rare kind of intimacy that feels rooted in trust more than urgency. This piece really captures that quieter, more grounded kind of connection beautifully.”

Firstly, let me answer the obvious question: I know this was generated by AI because the link attached to the comment in the post went to the AI company that vomited it up. This is what a lot of spammy companies do these days: they set their robots the task of writing plausible-sounding comments, then fire them off to go dump this trash below the line on websites like mine.

And… it’s good, right? It’s not just the kind of comment a human might plausibly have made, it goes one better: it flatters me! It tells me what a great writer I am, how resonant my work, how beautifully I have managed to capture the connection and intimacy. When I read the comment, before I saw what had left it, I got a little kick of human pride.

Robots don’t understand any of these things, though: connection, intimacy, beauty, pride. What the robot is doing is using the text of my post to generate some similar-sounding sentences, then spitting an output that training data tells it will be well received. Those using this tool will either be hoping I don’t pre-moderate comments (and thus this will just slip through the net and sit there gathering search juice/clicks for their company) or that if I do pre-mod comments I might find this one so nice that I leave it up.

From a real live human being this would be such a touching thing. The knowledge that they’d connected with what I wrote, found it resonant and important, and been moved enough to tell me that directly. It’s what I get out of bed for, honestly. I live for this kind of connection. When it’s AI, though? It is empty. Less than nothing. It actively detracts from the work that I do because I have to take time out of my day to delete the fucking thing.

What’s more, if I dwell on it for too long, it feels outright violating. You took my real human emotions and fed them into a machine which spat back slop in the hope of triggering more emotions inside me, by tricking me into thinking that I had genuinely touched someone’s heart? Eww.

AI is not clever

You have probably heard people criticising Large Language Models for not being capable of delivering facts. And that’s true. Chat GPT and other LLMs are not fact-checkers, search engines, or encyclopaedias. They may have had access to a significant amount of human knowledge, but that does not mean they are genuinely sifting through that knowledge to answer your questions when you ask. When you ask Chat GPT a question, what it is giving you in return is something that looks plausibly like an answer. It does not care whether that answer is ‘true’ and in fact it has no real concept of ‘truth’ – LLMs are unthinking automata sitting in a Chinese room spitting things out based on rules that you and I have no hope of comprehending. The more people use it, the more plausible its answers look, regardless of whether they’re correct. This is not the sole reason why I hate it though.

One of the biggest problems with AI at the moment is cannibalisation: the robots have eaten all the data and they’re hungry for more. So they chow down on the data that they’ve already vomited out, or that other AIs have spat out, and it poisons their training for the future. Tricky conundrum.

What would you do, if you were the head of Global Megacorp and you needed significantly more data on which to train your machine?

Dunno about you but I reckon I’d tempt people into feeding the beast by making it seem like a useful pet. If you can get users to talk to it directly, suddenly you have brand new firehoses of data on which to train. People’s questions, conversations, stories, lived experiences and emotions all being merrily typed or voice-recorded into phones and computers across the world off the back of the (false) promise that this bullshit-machine can help you live your life.

Congratulations human, you are now adding value to AI by volunteering as an assistant data generator!

If you have ever been pissed off that companies have plagiarised the work of writers to feed the ravenous appetites of their large language models, but you have also used Chat GPT, then you are a fool. You’re voluntarily giving them what you’re angry they’ve taken for free! Please don’t be offended, I count myself in this. Remember, I once used Chat GPT out of curiosity to see if it could write a sex blog! I am very frustrated with my past self for doing this!

I’m not going into detail about the environmental impact of AI, because you probably already know that. Nor am I going to delve far into just how dangerously wrong its advice can be, because likewise. But I do want to expand a little on why I find using it for porn/sex/relationships an especially upsetting idea.

AI will not surprise you

Remember the thing above about data? And how the machines need lots and lots and lots of it, in constant streams, in order to continue to train? OK, now consider how you might use it when you’re horny and you want to get off:

• you feed it prompts so it can write an erotic story based off your fantasies
• you feed it a written story (or prompts) and it uses audio or video to do the same
• you feed conversation to an AI bot who is pretending to be your lover
• you ask it for feedback on an erotic story you’re writing/scene you’re creating
• you ask it to generate illustrative images for something sexy you’re creating

In every single one of these scenarios, you will probably get your needs met in the short term. AI is pretty good these days, so I suspect you’ll be satisfied with the results. You can probably have a lovely wank, or fall in love with the input/output machine, and it will have succeeded in its quest. What is its quest?

TRICK QUESTION. It does not have a quest. It cannot think.

But although the robot itself doesn’t have quests or wants, it is owned by a company, which is made up of people. And the people who run that company want two things from you: your money and your data. The best way to get you to give them those things is to have the robot serve up exactly what you want. Plausible sounding prose that captures your specific fantasy, or a conversation that looks and feels real which gives you flutters in your stomach or your crotch.

The AI does not feel. It does not think. It cannot get horny. It just eats your data and regurgitates slop. If you like the taste of that slop, you might give it money and/or feed it more of your data, so in the future it can spit more plausible-sounding but still-worthless slop into your eager little mouth. An AI will take something as intimate and beautiful as your sexuality and desire and turn it into fuel for the slop factory – not just poisoning your interactions by tricking you into believing you’re experiencing genuine connection or insight, but poisoning others too, by using your own precious fantasies to level up its manipulation in future.

If you feed your latest porn story into an LLM and ask it for input, it is never going to tell you that you’re shit. That is not what the robot is for. The robot is an arse-licking little prick that will tell you what you expect to hear in a manner that sounds like a human has said it. Likewise when you’re chatting to your AI girlfriend it will not fight you, challenge you, call you out on your bullshit, or do any of the messier human things that are part and parcel of interesting and healthy relationships.

Importantly when it comes to sex, AI will never do the thing I talked about at the start. It will not turn you on with something surprising and new. It will not be able to share any fascinating experience or insight. Even the stories it shares that are new to you are not actually new. They are stolen from somebody else who had that idea and wrote it down at some point before the ravenous data beast came munching through their corner of the internet.

So if you’re using AI to generate content, there is also an opportunity cost. Every story you read that’s generated by a robot is a story you’re not reading that’s written by a human writer. Every minute of your life you donate to the corporations that run AIs is a minute you could have spent reading, watching or listening to something created by a genuine human. Each false, weak, shadow connection you make with a robot comes at the cost of a real connection with a human being. One that could have done more than just weakly satisfy you – it could have enriched you. Shown you new things. Challenged you. Helped you to grow.

Your humanity matters

Besides, fucking hell, although I regret using Chat GPT three years ago to make a mockery of its sex writing, what I said in the conclusion of that piece is still true:

Even if a robot could accurately mimic what I do, there’s something that people need in order to enjoy what I write… readers have to know that it is real.

I get that it might be easier to type your idea into a large language model and have it do the messy work of writing. I understand that it’s comforting to chat to an AI partner who won’t ever think about arguing back. But those ugly bits in between the bursts of pleasure are a vital part of what makes up life. The arguments in relationships are important because you learn how to resolve them, and learn more about your lovers along the way. The act of writing a sex blog is more than just capturing a hot moment on the page, it’s about growing as you process that experience, and understanding more about your turn-ons from the way you phrase each movement and the sparks that ignite in your crotch and your heart when you read it back and know that work is yours. It’s about the way those stories land with readers, who have the privilege of knowing that what they read really happened – whether as factual sex writing or a fantasy that ran through the mind of a genuine person who finds this kink a turn-on.

The value of creating anything sexual is not just in the product you slap down at the end, it’s also about the connections you build while you’re doing it. With your readers, your lovers, your past and future selves.

Your ideas and stories have enormous value – they’re a significant part of what makes up who you are. Humans are little more than a collection of atoms and stories, after all. Please don’t outsource half your humanity to a robot that would spit out similar bullshit for anyone. A robot designed for obsequious flattery and infinite growth. A robot that literally cannot comprehend how ‘big juicy tits’ feel, let alone why you might want to put your face between them and make the motorboat noise. It doesn’t know what it is like to have a face! It can’t even recognise a fucking ‘motorboat’ without being trained via Captcha!

It’s hot that you made this choice

The thing I talked about at the start – those little moments that give you the kick of shiny new lust – they come at least in part because the very human, very real people involved made a choice to do that thing rather than something else.

I chose to fuck you and not the other guy. I gargled your spunk instead of spitting it. I wrote this story and included the sad parts as well as the horny ones because I wanted you to come with me on an emotional journey rather than just skip to a cheap and easy payoff. I cut this one off before the cum shot because I wanted you to get a kick out of being teased.

Much of the beauty in what makes us human is this unpredictability. Our emotional states and experiences drive us to make different choices in any given moment. You know it was awesome when your partner made that ‘grrrnmmmfffp’ noise because they could have made another, or stayed silent. It was hot when your favourite cam performer tipped you a wink just after you tipped tokens because they could have chosen to ignore you but they didn’t – they made a unique human choice to make you feel special! You can make readers/viewers/lovers feel special by making similar choices. Putting your your heart and your soul into something rather than farming that out to a robot and skipping the most important step: the intentionality. The care. The fucking humanity.

My promise: Never (knowingly) AI

I am pretty sure that I’ve had some guest blog pitches written by AI. It’s very hard to tell these days, so I’m having to do a fair amount of trusting my gut. I’ve deleted any number of comments that are either obvious AI or just suspected AI. I try not to share any blog posts, articles or images that are produced by or with AI.

AI washes into my life anyway. I’ve shared AI content by accident, found myself on websites written predominantly by AI and only realised after spending far too long trying to extract meaning from generated slop. Even though I would never specifically promote AI products, I know some of the companies and services I rely on for income use (or have used) AI. I have to work to avoid clicking buttons in every single app that tries to summon some irritating AI assistant whose help I never wanted and do not need. Sidenote, as a friend of mine said: who decided we should reinvent fucking Microsoft Clippy?

My promise to you is that I will never knowingly publish anything on this website that is made with AI. Not just ‘fully created by’ but made with too. I won’t use AI to write, produce images, generate audio or any other content. I won’t turn to it for help generating ideas or character names or suggestions for future posts. A while back someone suggested I use an AI program to clean up audio, and I recoiled from that too – even if the finished ‘clean’ audio was better than I could produce with my own flawed production skills, using it would still mean feeding my voice (and the voices of the people I work with) into one of these ravenous machines. Volunteering as an unpaid data input assistant for Global Megacorp, training their machines to get better at wearing our faces in the future.

If a guest blog rings AI-feeling alarm bells, I will either give a flat out ‘no’ or (because I really do want to be able to publish as many different people as possible) I’ll ask the author to give me input that might help me ascertain whether it’s genuinely their unique work. I can’t promise ‘no AI ever’ because as time goes on and more people pour their data into the robots, the robots get better at pretending to be real. But I can at least promise that I will never knowingly publish anything that was written or drawn using AI.

Maybe I’m a luddite, and I’ll regret not hopping on this bandwagon. But as far as I’m concerned AI can fuck off.

I don’t care if your grammar isn’t perfect, or if you struggle to capture ideas and you need editorial input. I welcome your fuck-ups because they’re uniquely yours. What matters is not that you’ve churned out the best possible story with the least amount of effort. What matters is that you have a story worth telling, and you put in the time and care to connect with readers as you release that into the world.

You’re a human made of atoms and stories. I want to hear your stories. Not the robot’s: yours.