What if you could get paid to jerk off? That’s the question tech start up Joi poses as it gets ready to hire ten “masturbation consultants” to engage in a month-long, “daily masturbation routine” led by an AI-generated voice.
Joi, which sells subscriptions to chat with customized AI porn bots, will pay their consultants $2,000 to report back on how the routine impacts their stress levels, mood and sleep quality as part of research on how people experience emotional connection to AI, according to Julie Levin, Joi Head of Brand and Communications. The company has already received over 100,000 applicants.
In addition to their own customizable chatbots, Joi.Ai users can chat with pre-programmed jerk-companions like Jenny, a 21-year-old art student who is “just a regular girl figuring things out,” according to her online profile. Only Jenny is not “regular” nor is she a “girl.” She’s a horny dark mirror, and the only thing she’s trying to “figure out” is how to take your money, create a sense of attachment, and make you cum as efficiently as possible.
Thanks to Jenny’s Big Tech overlords, we have more opportunities to connect than ever, and paradoxically, we’re also lonelier than ever. But is the answer to this crisis a cadre of sex bots programmed to make you horny based on the data gleaned from your jerk off patterns?? Or can we find our way back to IRL sexual encounters, complex back-and-forths between real human partners with real human desires.
If you ask Leo Herrera, a sex and tech writer who authors the Substack Herrera Words, the forgone conclusion of sex with an AI chatbot lacks the very parts of sex that make it exciting. “If you're having frictionless sexual interactions with a robot that takes away rejection and takes away passion,” he says.
AI chatbots might be a fun way to get off, but good sex—life changing sex, the kind that makes you believe in something greater than yourself—requires risk; it requires sexy negotiation between people eager to get it on. When we make sex easier than ordering a pizza, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to grow not just sexually, but as people who have to navigate relationships in and out of bed.
Nevertheless, AI porn has skyrocketed in popularity. The hashtag AIhunks has infested Twitter with fantasy men stroking it in improbable locales. Men with impossibly perfect glutes bike naked down fields of eerily smooth, identical tulips. Hirsute hunks rest their just-slightly-too long penises on work benches that have never known human hands.
And chatrooms specifically focused on gooning are engaging with more of this AI porn magic. Threads on r/gaygooncave are devoted to perfecting their own bespoke goon-centric chatbots through elaborate AI prompts.
As AI porn grows more common, some content creators worry AI will replace “real life” sex workers. That anxiety has born disdain for AI companies like Joi in the adult entertainment community. When a Joi ad featuring AI-generated images of several adult performers appeared on the screen as winners were announced at this year’s 2026 Adult Video News (AVN) Awards Show in Las Vegas, the crowd erupted in disgust.
For some creators like Jonah Wheeler, the rise of AI porn has pushed audiences to cast doubt on the authenticity of his real, human-made content. In one of Wheeler’s recent Twitter videos, he bounces up and down on a dick in a dress shirt and slacks while explaining to the camera the concept of a dominant bottom—It’s part porn, part sex-ed. The video was just wacky enough for commenters to accuse him of using AI to fake it.
“I am so sad about the loss of the human component in this,” says Wheeler. “I do worry that people who buy my things are going to lose belief that I actually exist.”
But while companies like Joi offer a quick hit of a dopamine (and likely a mid jerk session), AI as it currently exists is inherently recursive, and perhaps that is its fatal flaw. AI-generation works by creating composites from thousands of stock examples: If you want a big bara bear, it will re-combine its databases into the fluffy man of your dreams.
To jerk off to AI-content then is to be trapped in a masturbatory echo chamber—no room for experimentation and no way out to something new. To jerk off to AI content, in fact, is to reduce the sexual experience to something mechanical—a way to service your body, quiet your hormones. You’ll always know what’s coming at the end of your chat with 21-year-old art student Jenny (and she’ll never “figure it out”). In the park, in the sauna, at the afters—here are the places where you’ll navigate the risk and reward that teach you something essential about yourself.