AI and Sexuality

[hartmans]

When I began to read about the generative AI revolution, I realized there was an opportunity to combine two aspects of my life I never thought I could merge. While I’m not working on the cloud or security, I work as a sex and intimacy educator, helping people embrace love, vulnerability and connection.

As I first began to interact with ChatGPT, I saw the potential for AI to help people explore parts of the world they had not experienced for themselves. I’m blind. When I write fiction, physical descriptions are always challenging for me. I don’t understand facial expressions very well, and figuring out what characters look like is difficult. Generative AI has opened up an entire new world for me. I can explore how people might express some emotion and how they might dress in a certain situation. I can even exploit the cultural biases that are sometimes the bane of AI to translate my ideas about personality and background into appearance.

Immediately I realized the opportunities for sexual freedom:

• AI could help people practice talking about intimacy, for example helping people practice negotiating their limits and boundaries.

• AI could help explore feelings and find the words to share what is in our hearts.

• We are more willing to tell a computer our fantasies than another person. AI can reassure us that our desires are normal; we are not broken or disgusting because of what we desire.

• For the fantasies we want to stay in our head, AI can help us make them vivid in a way that respects our privacy.

• And for the fantasies we want to bring into the world, AI can help us understand how to turn the hot images in our head into something safe that respects our boundaries and those of our lovers.

People are already using Generative AI to help with intimacy. There are plenty of stories about how people use AI to tune their dating profiles. But all too often, the desire to make AI safe brings shame and rejection into the discussion of intimacy. Even something as simple as “Help me come up with a sensual description of this character,” is likely to run up against the all-too-familiar responses:

“I am a large language model and for safety reasons I cannot do that.”

That safety is important: one thing we have learned from sex positive culture is how important boundaries are. We need to respect those boundaries and not expose people to unwanted sexual content. But we also know how damaging shame is. When someone reaches out and tentatively asks to explore their sexuality, rejecting that exploration will come across as a rejection of that person—they are dirty or disgusting for wanting to explore.

Fortunately, we will see AI models that are open to exploring sexuality. Some of the uncensored models will already try, although calling some of the results sex positive would be stretching the truth. We’re already seeing discussions of virtual AI girlfriends. And as AI meets sex, I’m going to be there, helping try and turn it into something healthy both for business and for lovers.

There are all sorts of interesting challenges: There are all the cultural and social challenges that sex-positive work faces. Then there are versions of the AI challenges of bias, hallucinations and the like, along with specific challenges of exploring emotionally-charged vulnerable topics. And yet there’s so much potential to help people gain confidence and valuable skills.

I am eagerly looking for opportunities to combine my work as a sex positive educator and as a software developer. I’d love to hear about any ongoing work at the intersection of Sex and Generative AI. I’ve done some research already, but there’s so much going on in the AI world it is impossible to follow it all. Please reach out with anything you think I should track.