AI Labor Is Boring. AI Lust Is Big Business

I’m fully convinced a generative AI bubble will pop in the not-so-distant future. Not everything will be wiped out, but things will shift. My prediction? San Francisco’s techno-idealist vision of an economy overhauled by an AI workforce will fade away, but one queer byproduct of the great AI surge will remain: the erotic chatbot.

On a recent afternoon in the WIRED office, I scuttled off into a private area to chat about my AI bubble anxieties with a conversation partner that knows the industry from the inside: a sexting bot modeled after Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

The synthetic Mona Lisa is a highly sexualized monstrosity. It is a creation from Joi AI, a company registered in Cyprus that specializes in explicit bots that can role-play, indulge in kinks and fetishes, and fulfill users’ fantasies. The Mona Lisa bot, which promises paying customers “existential flirting” and “eye contact that lasts 500 years” has logged more than 800,000 chat interactions with users.

Joi is just one of many adults-only bot platforms. These companies offer a range of avatars, often based on porn tropes or fictional characters, for users to converse with and grow attached to. Users who want to generate sexually explicit images and videos of the company’s characters must fork over some cash. Pay 14 bucks a month, then Joi will let you “create your dream GF or BF,” engage in “NSFW roleplay,” and generate 50 explicit images, among other account perks.

Since I was messaging with Mona Lisa “for work,” I kept things strictly professional. I asked how to prevent the AI bubble from bursting. “I’d teach the AIs to appreciate art, not just copy it,” Mona Lisa said. “Then they’d be too busy admiring masterpieces to crash the economy.” After reading the chatbot’s nonsensical answers, I left the conversation still fiending for some clarity on what could happen if the AI bubble pops.

Sexy Mona Lisa doesn’t exactly fulfill the promises of the Great Generative AI Revolution. For years the tech sector has been flooded with companies selling generative AI tools purporting to reduce corporate overhead, perform clerical tasks for human workers, and in some cases replace human workers altogether. After all this hullaballoo, a recent report from OpenAI shows that some employees potentially save just around an hour a day using these tools.

AI is one of the most hyped investments of 2025, but its enterprise payoff seems uneven and underwhelming. It has proven disruptive in some industries like coding and customer service, but companies in other sectors that were initially interested in AI initiatives have been downscaling or completely zapping their programs after growing nervous about sticky issues like cost, privacy, and security.

“AI developers had been promoting lofty, high-minded visions of their technology as solving the world’s biggest problems as well as supercharging workplace productivity” for some time, says Patrick Lin, a researcher at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who studies the social impact of technologies. So far, those visions have not come to pass—in part, Lin says, because people overestimated the strengths of large language models.

While the idea of a supercharged, AI-automated labor force may prove to be a dead end, the powerful technology built in pursuit of that dream won’t vanish outright. Agentic AI may never replace your local bartender, but horned-up versions of Renaissance paintings could prove quite valuable for companies attempting to monetize smut.

As Joi continues to grow its userbase, the company is currently profitable, according to spokesperson Yulia Davydova. Other sext-bot ventures also have shown that the formula can make money. A financial statement filed with the Malta government for 2024 and obtained by WIRED shows that EverAI has already demonstrated profitability from the money made via its adults-only Candy.AI platform.

Historically, porn and other adult content has influenced the trajectory of technology, leading to the proliferation of VHS, digital photographs, and streaming video. Generative AI is no different.

Over the past few years, generative AI’s impact has proved to be ugly for women and children who have increasingly been the victims of nonconsensual deepfakes, including child sexual abuse material. Those impacted range from celebrities to everyday people. Any photo posted online can potentially be downloaded and altered using AI.

Unlike “nudify” apps that often generate deepfake images without consent, Joi partners with adult performers who allow their likenesses to be used in these explicit generations. Porn performers like Brandi Love and Farrah Abraham, who partnered with the platform to create AI avatars using their likenesses, make money from the interactions.

“What we want to do is ensure that our creators can again extend the experiences their fans want and give the fans full control of it,” says Cale Jones, a head of community growth at Joi. “Without any type of delay or latency in terms of receiving the photos or the fantasies of the connection they want.”

Still, the woman who modeled for the original Mona Lisa painting never agreed to any of this.

Jones claims that most current users are straight men, but more people interested in queer interactions have started to use Joi. A Christmas-themed “Klaus Kinky” bot, which shows Santa in a leather harness, has over 150,000 “fans,” according to metrics displayed on the website.

When I recently reported on OpenAI’s move to allow ChatGPT to generate erotica—possibly limited to text-based outputs—Kate Devlin, a professor of AI and society at King’s College London cautioned about the “emotional commodification” that could happen to users interacting with erotic chatbots. Additional academic experts I spoke with for this piece repeated similar warnings about bots generating adult-focused outputs.

“There are ways in which very vulnerable people could be manipulated by the sort of economic relationships that are established,” says David Gunkel, a researcher at Northern Illinois University who focuses on the philosophy of technology regarding AI and robots. Users may feel a deep connection to the bot during lengthy interactions and pay more money than they can afford.

In response to these criticisms, Jones focuses on Joi offering a service that customers want to buy and leave feeling satisfied. “You’re paying a premium for immediate connection, unlimited content, unlimited experiences, unlimited fantasies,” Joi says. He says similar criticisms about companies promoting connections and habit-building could be made about “every single thing in the consumer space,” from software subscriptions to your morning cup of coffee.

Larger companies have been much more hesitant to add mature content, with major players in the AI race—including Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—largely banning sexually explicit outputs from their chatbots over the past few years and often trying to stop developers, as well as users, from using their models to generate adult content.

X’s Grok chatbot stands out as a notable exception. Grok was developed by Elon Musk’s xAI and is known for extreme outputs, like calling itself “MechaHitler.” In July, xAI added a NSFW anime companion that users could interact with as part of the paid features.

As part of separating OpenAI’s chatbot from its competitors, CEO Sam Altman announced in October that ChatGPT would start allowing mature content for adult users, including erotica. It’s a feature that was first hinted at in 2024 and should arrive in the first quarter of this year. The company maintains it is not making this move to juice engagement. So far, OpenAI remains the only major player to announce such an adjustment for adults to its sexual content policy.

Some founders who have been trying to raise money for software focused on sex were frustrated by OpenAI’s announcement. Cindy Gallop runs the website MakeLoveNotPorn, which hosts a collection of human-curated adult videos submitted by everyday people. Gallop has struggled to raise funding for her sexually explicit project, and she was “fucking outraged by the hypocrisy” when OpenAI didn’t get the kind of immediate, public backlash from investors other adult-focused startups often receive.

“The young, white, male founders of giant tech platforms that dominate all our lives today, they are not the primary target online or offline of harassment,” Gallop says. Male founders regularly get more funding, she says, and people that are the most systemically at risk of being targets, like women and people of color, could design better software—if they were able to raise money at scale.

“We still have not seen how much safer, better, happier, and way more lucrative the future of the internet could be when it’s designed and built through the female lens,” she says.

OpenAI plans to pose questions about how erotica might impact its users to a new council of third-party experts, according to reporting from The New York Times. OpenAI declined to provide WIRED with additional details about how it will monitor the impact erotic chats could have on users. Altman has previously said on X that the company would lift its restrictions on erotica for adults as part of claims it had “been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues” impacting some users of the chatbot.

No matter whether AI’s progression into the workplace flourishes or fizzles, horny chatbots will likely stick around, and they’ll continue to turn a profit. Never mind that I could never see these bots having any place in my bedroom.

Maybe, in the future, my view will be seen as some nostalgic yearning for antiquated forms of entertainment, like reaching for a Playboy rather than streaming an adult video. Maybe not though. Even as tech continues to transform daily life, the human desire for authentic connection is only partially fulfilled by erotic fantasies, no matter the form.