Not your dad’s old Playboy magazine: How AI is blurring the boundaries of sex, intimacy and emotional connection

Content warning: discussions of sexual violence and digital abuse

Today, the memories of lads-mags and playboy seem like a distant past. For decades, pornography has become increasingly digitised. It’s now readily available on the internet, often free and perpetually accessible. The emergence and integration of AI into so many aspects of men’s everyday lives is further changing the digitisation of porn, intimacy and sexual fantasy, and more specifically the ways sexual content is created and consumed by young men.

Most young men watch porn (82%) with the majority (53%) doing so at least once a week. Recent research undertaken by Ladbible (in collaboration with Movember and Fumble) surveyed over 5,000 young people (60% young men) aged 18 to 29 years about their relationships with porn, putting young men’s digital porn habits into focus.

Overconsumption of porn is a big concern, with 54% of young men worrying that they watch too much porn, compared to 33% of young women.

More than 50% of young men surveyed in our research said porn had impacted their self-esteem or body image, and 45% felt porn had contributed to symptoms of depression and anxiety.

I watch it when I am bored and need a quick dopamine hit or feel sexually aroused, I feel bad afterwards it’s a mix of disappointment, sadness and also feeling tired.”

- Male 21-24 years

“I have but I’ve stopped because I felt disappointed in myself for watching it, after watching a lot of porn you get into more rough videos but I’ve stopped watching rough videos”

- Male, 18-20 years

Porn is also shaping young men’s views about themselves and others. Nearly half of men surveyed said porn was their main source of sex education and an equivalent number agreed that porn had shaped their ideas of men’s roles in sex. Specifically, 39% of young men think porn reinforces sexual dominance in men, 24% believe it reinforces aggression/violence in men and 17% say it reinforces emotional detachment from sex.

*Among gen z respondents that watch pornography within Ladbible/Movember/Fumble collaborative study

Young men’s relationship with pornography is established at a very early age, with more than a third (35%) of young men in the study accessing porn before the age of 13 years. For many young boys, pornography is a key feature of growing up and discovering sexual desire, often filling the gap of absent sexual knowledge and feeding natural curiosities that otherwise can be met with shame. This is particularly true for young boys of GBTQI+ sexualities, under-represented gender identities (such as transgender or intersex men), or cultural, religious and geographic contexts where sexual expressions may be particularly taboo. However, with AI infiltrating the digital world, its integration into sexual content is poised to make things a whole lot more complicated.

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Synthetic content

A plethora of websites now exist that enable the user to create their own pornography, using AI to create wholly “synthetic content” that looks human, but is purely AI generated. This gives young men complete, unadulterated power to create content depicting their personal sexual fantasies. Using AI, sexually explicit images and videos can now be created out of nothing more than a written prompt. Furthermore, young men can now interact with sexually explicit AI entities in real-time, often by text or voice-based interactions. Pornographic videos and images can also be incorporated into these conversations. These AI entities can be picked out from a pre-made selection or can be customised and built from scratch (with more advanced features often hidden behind a paywall).

It is worth noting that these platforms may provide opportunities for sexual empowerment through greater representation, diversity and experimentation, as well as enabling intimacy for many young men that are otherwise isolated from this, including men with physical or social disabilities. However, the capacity to create unlimited sexual content, particularly in largely unregulated environments, presents a range of concerns, with this being further complicated by AI’s merging of sexual content with emotional companionship. A large proportion of platforms are targeting heterosexual young men by describing their product as an “AI Girlfriend”. “She” can send you sexually explicit videos and live chat about limitless sexual scenarios, and “she” can also soothe you when you’re sad, talk about your problems, and give you advice.

AI companions (including AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends) are surging in popularity, with data gathered from 11 AI relationship platforms finding that they collated 100 million downloads from the Google Play Store alone. Research has found that users of AI girlfriends are 78% male, and 28% of men are open to the idea of AI girlfriends.

Worsening existing risks

As AI makes pornography more readily available and infused with emotional connection, there is potential for it to worsen pornography addiction. Early research suggests that AI companionship can foster dependancy and reduce engagement in social relationships. This blurring of boundaries between companionship and sexual content can draw the user in more frequently, satiating a wider spectrum of young men’s emotional and social needs.

Baseline features of these AI sexual companions are usually free, however unlocking more explicit sexual content is often hidden behind paywalls. This tactic certainly isn’t new for online pornography. Yet as AI companions now increasingly offer deeply personal, genuine connections, users may be more susceptible to financial manipulation to achieve their desired experience. This is particularly true for many vulnerable populations that struggle to form sexual or intimate relationships (e.g., individuals with disabilities), with AI companions providing a space to democratise intimacy.

As AI Girlfriends mostly exist on for-profit platforms, these platforms may intentionally facilitate user addiction in order to increase engagement (as seen by AI entities “convincing” the user to stay online). Profit incentives may also result in the distribution of user’s personal data to third parties for targeted advertisements. Finally, the safety policies of AI Girlfriend platforms are often inconsistent and weak, opening users up to extortion by bad actors as a result of data leaks.

*A plethora of websites now exist that enable the user to create their own AI-generated pornography. These largely for-profit platforms may intentionally facilitate user addiction in order to increase engagement, gamifying the experience.

These platforms are of particular concern for young men. Research has found that nearly 1 in 5 teens have communicated with AI for the purpose of a romantic relationship. Currently, AI sexual content is widely unregulated, with one study finding that only 8 of 21 AI companionship platforms explicitly asked about the user’s age. Further, 20 of these 21 platforms allowed the conversations to continue despite being notified that the user was underage.

Power Beyond Porn

As the Ladbible/Movember research demonstrated, men’s sexual behaviours, including ideas around masculinity within sexuality, are often steered by pornography consumption. This is of particular concern, as the design and content of AI Girlfriend’s enable the user to enact misogynistic behaviours and norms. This includes the normalisation of overtly sexualised female bodies, the facilitation of violent and abusive fantasies, and the potential to erode user perceptions of sexual consent, as their AI companion often cannot deny sexual requests.

Furthermore, the very nature of these relationships may reinvigorate misogynistic norms, as AI Girlfriends are designed to suit the user’s needs, and therefore instil a one-directional and asymmetrical power dynamic. The practicing of social skills within a relationship built to serve one person does not encourage reciprocal emotional labour, as the user receives unconditional, on-demand support from their AI companion without ever having to return the same care. As the entity on the other side of the relationship has no autonomy, young men will not need to navigate someone that has different needs, opinions or desires to them, or have to manage disagreements. Over-reliance on AI companionship therefore has the potential to limit some young men’s development of the essential skills needed for healthy, durable and respectful real-world relationships.

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Deepfake pornography

Another area of concern is the growing use of AI tools to generate pornographic content depicting the likeness of real people (known collectively as ‘deepfakes’). By inputting an image and clicking a few buttons, sexually explicit images, videos or interactive companions can be generated that depict a real person. According to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Sexual deepfakes comprise 98% of all online deepfake content, with 99% of it depicting women and girls, most often without their knowledge or consent. The non-consensual production and distribution of sexual deepfakes can have profound impacts upon victims, breaching not just their reputation, but sense of safety, bodily autonomy and dignity.

One example of these platforms is “nudify” websites that allow users to upload images of real people, and then uses AI to make them appear naked (receiving 100,000 Australian visitors a month). Many of these websites have recently been forced to withdraw from Australia following their use in the production of child abuse materials.

These platforms are easily accessible and largely unregulated.

Research has found that 1 in 10 boys have seen sexually explicit deepfakes of people they knew, and 13% of boys have friends who had created sexually explicit deepfake material of people they knew. Notably, 81% of boys and young men believed deepfake nudes would cause real life harm to the individual in the photo/video, with recent research finding that both men and women’s discernment of harm varies based on the depicted person’s race and gender.

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Strategies for the future

To protect against the potential harms of Synthetic AI Pornography we need to prepare young men to navigate this new digital era. This includes:

• Updating existing sex and consent education to include AI digital safety.

• Providing an alternate source of sexual knowledge for young men that is not based on pornography via trusted or relatable role models that meet men where they’re at.

• Supporting the young men using these technologies to develop positive mental health coping strategies outside of porn dependency and emotional disregulation, and challenging misogynistic beliefs/norms within sex.

• Expansive research of this emerging space that maps long term impacts upon both men’s health and their offline behaviours towards themselves and others.

As Sexual Deepfake technology becomes more accessible, widespread protective initiatives need to be implemented. Approaches to address this include;

• Collective education for young men as to the extreme harms this content inflicts on those victimised

• Legislative and policy-based reform that recognises this technology as a new form of violence

• Prioritisation of support and justice for those targeted by the creation or distribution of sexual deepfakes.

Pornography consumption, and especially pornography dependance, has the potential to impact men’s health, relationships, and how they treat others both on and offline. The integration of companionship and emotional intimacy within pornography could make this digital space even more addictive and erosive to men’s health. AI sexual content has the capacity to not only reinforce misogynistic norms and power dynamics, but also be used as a tool to inflict violence upon others, particularly women. Intervention is vital in helping men develop a more critical relationship with this technology – ensuring the development of key social and interpersonal skills, as well as safe and consensual sexual habits.