Can AI be horny?

Archillect, an AI Twitter bot with 2.4 million followers, is designed to “to discover and share stimulating visual content.” That, for the most part, translates to images of cityscapes, architecture, and arty-looking animals. But every so often, the AI tweets out stimulating content of another kind.

That means conventionally sexy images of women: a naked one lying in a vat of cream-colored paint, a bethonged one with her butt pressed against the glass of a bus shelter, or this one, in close-up, sucking on her finger in an alluring way.

And each time Archillect displays these thirst-making images, its followers inevitably react with memes placing the bot in “horny jail.”

Everyone from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk has warned us that AI will someday have a mind of its own. Hawking once said that AI could “spell the end of the human race.” For right now, though, we’re getting headlines like this gem from 2016: “Thanks, Twitter. You turned Microsoft's AI teen into a horny racist.” So the question of the moment seems to be not whether AI will destroy us, but: Can AI, in fact, be horny?

Murat Pak — the developer behind Archillect, who answers questions like “What did you do before becoming a designer/developer” with responses like “I didn’t exist” — did not respond to multiple requests to speak for this story. So we don’t know what he thinks of her (yes, Archillect is a she) alleged horniness.

But the site’s about page does give us some clues as to how it all works: Based on keywords fed to it by a human, Archillect crawls the internet for content she believes will reach high levels of engagement online. “She tries to understand what is ‘liked’ on social media,” according to the site.

Without Pak available to wax poetic about what he calls his “digital muse,” Input reached out to several AI experts familiar with Archillect’s account. Dr. Kate Devlin, an AI and human-computer interaction researcher at King’s College London, for one, doesn’t think Archillect is explicitly horny. “When it posts pictures of backsides, it’s not doing so intentionally,” Devlin says. “Archillect has no concept of body parts; it’s just looking for images that meet loosely defined and adaptable criteria.”

Kyle Machulis, a computer science grad from the University of Oklahoma who develops sex tech, including Buttplug.io, an open-source sex-toy control system, puts it more succinctly. “The way I would phrase it is not that the AI itself is horny,” he says. “That’s really ascribing parameters and features to an algorithm that I don’t believe it can attain or have.

“All it’s really doing is looking for patterns,” he continues, “and it just so happens with Archillect that if you look at the aesthetic it follows, a lot of it is black and white stuff, with shiny surfaces — of course it’s going to pick up BDSM and latex gear.”

Archillect is as likely to post pictures of bridges or boats as it is butts, but because we’re human, we pay attention to and note the prevalence of ass cheeks on our timeline more readily. “As humans, we’re really good at seeing patterns all over the place, even when none exist,” says Dr. Michael Ekstrand of Boise State University, a computer scientist who studies and develops AI. “We see this account, we see the occasional misfires, and we as humans in our interpretation of what this bot is doing will go far further than the data support in ascribing intent.”

The context in which we encounter Archillect’s images also matters, says Machulis. Many people use Twitter as a place to congregate and talk about current events, and errant favoriting of porn occasionally makes headlines. We therefore see Archillect as doing something similar when it shares butts and boobs, he explains. And when Twitter followers react to it, they’re adding to a feedback loop that makes it more likely to happen in the future.

“One of its signals is engagement,” Ekstrand says, referring to Archillect. “And so the old adage ‘sex sells’ — that’s going to drive some engagement. It’s not that the bot is getting horny in the sense we would ascribe to a person. It’s that it’s learning a relationship between certain visual features it can extract from an image and getting lots of likes. It doesn’t particularly care or have any meaningful concept of what that association is or means.”

We’re also more likely to see patterns in the AI and attribute conscious behavior to it because that’s the way tech has always worked. “This is something we do in tech all the time: It’s not about doing the actual thing — it’s about fooling people that it’s happened,” says Machulis, who frequently calls upon the haptic illusion, where developers pretend something is responding to touch more than it actually is, in his own work.

“Close enough” is often the defining philosophy when it comes to AI and sex.

“Trying to accurately represent a mechanical representation of touch is so goddamned difficult and expensive,” he says. “What we have to do is go, ‘Well, the brain is a shitty pile of hacks, so what can we do to fool it in the cheapest way possible to make it feel 90 or 95 percent the same?’ That’s what’s going to happen with these algorithms. It’s close enough.”

“Close enough” is often the defining philosophy when it comes to AI and sex. Machulis points to the Autoblow AI blowjob device, which purportedly uses artificial intelligence to give users who are willing to insert their penis into a mechanized toy 10 different “blowjob experiences.” The machine, which retails for $299.95, “used artificial intelligence to analyze 1,000 hours of blowjob videos to understand the movements that occur during real life blowjobs,” its creators claim.

An academic paper tied to the device defines a “movement” as “simply a series of up/down motions at varying speeds, which are translated into motor movements.” Machulis is underwhelmed: “If that act specifically is tied to a single linear movement on a single axis as encoded by people, then okay, we have very different definitions of this act.” Yet because it’s to do with sex — and human brains short circuit when it comes to sex — the AutoBlow is at least passable. And at present, that’s good enough.

Whether AI will be able to feel sexual attraction in the long run is questionable. Devlin’s short answer to the question of whether AI can be horny is a simple, one-word one: No. But she has a slightly longer answer: “We are nowhere near the stage of AI that is sentient or conscious or can feel things.”

“Will AI ever encompass sexuality? That’s a hard question to answer, because they’re such different things.”

If we get there, we’ll probably have the same problems we have with AI deployed to identify faces for exam proctoring, facial recognition, or to screen job candidates: the implicit biases in human society are reflected in the coding. And as plenty of journalists have written about in the past, porn and sex are laden with racism and biases.

“This is a systemic social problem that isn’t easily solved,” says Devlin. “The first step is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. We as a society are beginning to do that: AI ethics has become a big talking point in the last few years. But there’s so much more that needs to be done, and there aren’t complete answers yet.”

The ethics of sex, just like its politics, are vitally important — either when we’re envisioning a future of AI-driven sexbots designed to provide pleasure, or an arty-image-focused Twitter bot getting all hot and bothered. But on that immediate question of the interconnection between AI, sex, and Archillect, Machulis prefers to redefine the question.

“Will AI ever encompass sexuality? That’s a hard question to answer, because they’re such different things,” says Machulis. “We get to this Turing Test idea: Not ‘Is it perfect?’ but ‘Is it good enough to fool someone?’ We’re having this conversation — therefore it’s already there.”