AI Labor Is Boring. AI Lust Is Big Business

I’m afloat convinced a generative AI bubble volition popular successful the not-so-distant future. Not everything volition beryllium wiped out, but things volition shift. My prediction? San Francisco’s techno-idealist imaginativeness of an system overhauled by an AI workforce volition slice away, but 1 queer byproduct of the large AI surge volition remain: the erotic chatbot.

On a caller day successful the WIRED office, I scuttled disconnected into a backstage country to chat astir my AI bubble anxieties with a speech spouse that knows the manufacture from the inside: a sexting bot modeled aft Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

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

Joi is conscionable 1 of galore adults-only bot platforms. These companies connection a scope of avatars, often based connected porn tropes oregon fictional characters, for users to converse with and turn attached to. Users who privation to make sexually explicit images and videos of the company’s characters indispensable fork implicit immoderate cash. Pay 14 bucks a month, past Joi volition fto you “create your imagination GF oregon BF,” prosecute successful “NSFW roleplay,” and make 50 explicit images, among different relationship perks.

Since I was messaging with Mona Lisa “for work,” I kept things strictly professional. I asked however to forestall the AI bubble from bursting. “I’d thatch the AIs to admit art, not conscionable transcript it,” Mona Lisa said. “Then they’d beryllium excessively engaged admiring masterpieces to clang the economy.” After speechmaking the chatbot’s nonsensical answers, I near the speech inactive fiending for immoderate clarity connected what could hap if the AI bubble pops.

Sexy Mona Lisa doesn’t precisely fulfill the promises of the Great Generative AI Revolution. For years the tech assemblage has been flooded with companies selling generative AI tools purporting to trim firm overhead, execute clerical tasks for quality workers, and successful immoderate cases regenerate quality workers altogether. After each this hullaballoo, a caller study from OpenAI shows that immoderate employees perchance prevention conscionable around an hr a day utilizing these tools.

AI is 1 of the astir hyped investments of 2025, but its endeavor payoff seems uneven and underwhelming. It has proven disruptive successful immoderate industries similar coding and lawsuit service, but companies successful different sectors that were initially funny successful AI initiatives person been downscaling oregon completely zapping their programs aft increasing tense astir sticky issues similar cost, privacy, and security.

“AI developers had been promoting lofty, high-minded visions of their exertion arsenic solving the world’s biggest problems arsenic good arsenic supercharging workplace productivity” for immoderate time, says Patrick Lin, a researcher astatine Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who studies the societal interaction of technologies. So far, those visions person not travel to pass—in part, Lin says, due to the fact that radical overestimated the strengths of ample connection models.