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 ...