The Horny Truth About AI Chatbots

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To understand the internet, you have to assume that everyone has a constant, low-level amount of horniness. I do not make this observation in a crass or judgmental way, but if you’re wondering what technologies will take hold in the future, the first place you want to check is the adult entertainment industry. 

This is why a recent quote from an AI founder caught my eye. In an interview with Wired, Avi Schiffmann pitched his new startup Friend, which sells a Bluetooth-connected pendant that listens to your conversations—not only with Friend but with everyone you encounter. Most of the company’s marketing materials show the device building an emotional connection with the user. “No, I think you were vulnerable. There’s a difference,” Friend responded in one image. (I’ve been chatting with Schiffmann for the last year and will review a demo unit soon for Every.) 

Friend isn't specifically designed to be a sexual companion, but he knows some people will use it that way. “For sure there will be some people that try and fuck the USB-C port of this,” he told Wired. “I think I'm shameless enough to understand what I'm building.” It’s startling to read Schiffmann’s assumption—but it’s almost certainly accurate.

Pornographic chatbots are some of the most popular and profitable AI applications in use today. Mainstream chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude won’t engage in sexual chatter, so a cottage industry has sprouted up to serve the good people of the internet.

Janitor AI attracted 1 million users in its first week. Lest you think that this is simply a problem of lonely men, 80 percent of Janitor’s users identify as non-male, and most of its most popular chatbots are male characters. Even the subreddit for the company has nearly 60,000 users! Others like Muah.AI report hitting $1 million in annualized revenue within months of launching. I was able to track down eight different services nearing similar levels of scale with names like Chai, Sakura, and SpicyChat. This is a Cambrian explosion of growth that reminds me of the early days of the Apple App Store. Each app offers not just smutty text, but the ability to design a character’s physical appearance and persona, and generate images of them doing things you asked them to.

All told, my back-of-the-napkin math means there are about 5-10 million monthly active users of these services today—a far larger user base than I think anyone has realized. 

An even larger market is for adult emotional entertainment. These companies aren’t porn-y, but offer some variation on emotional fulfillment, allowing people to role-play companionship. Character.AI has 3.5 million daily active users, each of whom spends two hours a day chatting on average. It facilitates conversations with fictional characters like Iron Man but also lets users role-play with a “school bully.” To give a sense of scale, the school bully character has had 125 million conversations with users. I don’t know of any other consumer company that had this level of growth and usage outside of early social media. Meta offers the ability to design chatbots with an AI studio where you can find psychics, popular anime characters, and even your new “gay bestie.” Each of the chatbots has public stats showing they’ve done hundreds of thousands of conversations with users.

The most common reaction to these statistics is a general sensation of bile. It feels weird that people are building emotional—and even sexual—relationships with algorithms. Plus, there’s an even more worrying underbelly: Many of the seedier parts of the internet have forum discussions on how to use these bots to role-play with “under-18” characters, which feels like it should be illegal.