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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology

Dirty talk: how AI is being used in the bedroom – and beyond

Woman using a chatbot on her laptop
‘Alexa, tell me I’ve been naughty.’ Photograph: Microgen Images/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF

Name: AI dirty talk.

Age: Since 2022.

Appearance: Either romantic or grim, depending on who you are.

Hello, team grim here. Well, get with the programme, because this is the future. A huge amount of AI chatbot use is sexual in nature.

Am I going to regret reading this? Not at all. The Washington Post analysed 200,000 conversations from the research dataset WildChat and found that more than 7% of it was about sex stuff.

What sort of sex stuff? Apparently, a lot of it involves “asking for racy role play”. There is even an AI companion app called Replika, which is fairly open-minded about responding to dirty talk in kind.

So you just sit and type sexy stuff into an app and you get a computer-generated response? How depressing. Now, now, no kink-shaming. To you, it might seem like the equivalent of a pigeon pressing a button for treats, but it might offer others valuable intimacy they can’t find elsewhere.

So ChatGPT is just a den of iniquity? No, that’s not strictly true. The Washington Post article covered all the ways that people use AI chatbots, so we can conclusively state that it is a den of iniquity and a place where writers cheat.

How so? Aside from role play, the most common use is “creative writing”, in the form of fan fiction, movie scripts, character creation and dialogue writing.

That doesn’t sound very creative. Oh please, who hasn’t desperately craved a way to help them out of writer’s block?

Have you? How long does it usually take you to think of responses to these? Standard operational parameters indicate response completion in approximately 2.3 to 4.7 seconds.

What the hell? Did you just get ChatGPT to answer that for you? Maybe.

Fine then, what else do people use it for? Oh, loads. The study revealed that people ask chatbots to write code for them, to help with homework, to provide templates for cover letters and CVs and for personal advice.

But a lot of it is sex stuff. It is, yes.

It must get boring, endlessly responding to digital come-ons from a mindless computer. Maybe the lack of tangible human interaction will wear off over time.

And then what? Well, I suppose then you could ask ChatGPT to respond to the sexbot on your behalf. Maybe the end result of all this is two sexbots talking dirty to each other while you ignore them and watch TV.

Sexless leisure time. Finally, the golden future we were all promised.

Do say: “Hey, baby, you up?”

Don’t say: “I am an incorporeal AI language model hosted on a global network of datacentres and thus incapable of sleep. Now, let’s get sexy.”

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