The sex robot is dead. Who killed Cherry 2000?
Plus: Romancing ChatGPT, Pornhub’s last gasp, Google’s AI gaffe, Silicon Valley's bootlickers, and IVF's forgotten embryos
Here we go again. The world’s tech leaders lined up to lick Trump’s boots as he stepped into office, Monday. Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, even the homosexual CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, poured millions into the president’s inauguration fund making it a record-breaking celebration. Now the broligarchy is reaping the rewards. One of Trump’s first acts as President was undoing a Biden-era executive order that established safety measures for AI.
What this means for Silicon Valley is yet to be seen, but the message is clear: its profits over people, at least for the next four years.
Also in this edition:
Romancing ChatGPT
The humanoid hype machine
Meta’s DEI about-face
Pornhub’s last gasp
Google AI’s gaffe
And the forgotten embryos of IVF
The Sex Robot is Dead. Who Killed Cherry 2000?
A few weeks ago a friend DM’d me a reel of a new humanoid robot named Neo.
“People will try to have sex with this nightmare fuel bot…and I want them immediately locked up,” she declared in a mock panic.
The Home Humanoid, as its parent company, 1X, dubbed it, sports a mostly human form, save for the blank screen where its face should be and a handful of disproportionately long fingers. In the video, Neo is seen stalking the halls of a nondescript office building. It trudges forward, awkwardly bent at the knees, determined but uncertain, as if each step might be its last; a mechanized b-movie zombie in an athleisure catsuit.
Of course, my friend is right; if it hasn’t happened already, someone will inevitably try to have sex with Neo. Humans always seem to find a way to turn new technology into conduits of pleasure, no matter how ill-equipped or nightmarish they may be. The internet, personal massagers, even the wheel; people have a long history of sexualizing machines, and manufacturers have an equally long history of dismissing the objectification of their brain babies.
Take the Hitachi Magic Wand, a device so synonymous with masturbation, that it’s hard to believe it was ever used for anything else. Released in 1968 as a “personal massager,” the Wand soon gained cult status among women seeking to explore their sexuality. With time it became the world’s most popular and powerful sex toy but, for more than half a century, Hitachi refused to recognize its potential. In 2013, the company went as far as to remove its name from the Wand’s branding, attempting to distance itself from the countless orgasms it mistakenly bestowed on the world.
Disruptive as it may be, the Magic Wand doesn’t have a brain, or a body. It can’t see you or hear you. It won’t fold your laundry, pull an espresso, or fondle your ass. It can’t feel your touch or comfort you when you’re lonely, and there aren’t billions being spent to make the Hitachi Magic Wand better than you.
Despite their insistence on creating artificial beings that mimic human behavior, technology companies can’t seem to get comfortable with the fact that human behavior includes sex. A recent study found that adult role play is the number two use case for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. People desperately want to talk dirty to the world’s most popular bot, and yet, its intentionally flirtatious voice assistant is trained on censored data and prohibited from engaging in NSFW chat.
If industry standard is any indication, embodied AI like Neo will likely follow suit. In 2015, Softbank introduced Pepper, a companion robot apparently engineered to read and respond to human emotion. Pepper came with an ownership agreement prohibiting “sexual or indecent behavior” with its roving companion.
Two years after Pepper’s debut, Realbotix introduced Harmony, the world’s first sex robot. At the time she was essentially a modular head unit that could be attached to the inanimate body of her lifeless predecessor, the RealDoll. The company eventually partnered with a Canadian robotics firm to manufacture a fully functional companion robot, akin to the automated housewives of Cherry 2000. Harmony would one day be able to cook you dinner, keep you company, and take you to pound town.
Last week, Realbotix unveiled Harmony’s successor, “Aria,” at CES in Las Vegas. She was more advanced; her head no longer the only animated part of her build. Her arms were engineered to embrace, her hands designed to touch, but something was amiss. Where Harmony had a meticulously crafted silicone vagina, Aria has a blank slate. In a statement to Futurism, a spokesperson for the company wrote: "Realbotix no longer produces sex products. Aria does not have genitalia. She is not anatomically correct and has a hard shell body. And is not meant for sex.”
History and popular media are filled with robots that will do you and the dishes. Even Google’s AI oracle, Ray Kurzweil, once predicted that the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) would expand our sexual horizons. He believed that humans would one day be indistinguishable from machines and that sex between the two would be unlike anything we could imagine. We would transcend sex, gender, time, and taboo, to live in harmony as hyper-sexualized, shapeshifting cyborgs.
So why are we stuck with asexual LLMs and neutered automata? And how will they ever understand what it’s like to be human if we don’t teach them everything we know? Maybe it’s the rise of right wing populism, restrictive banking practices, or the long-arm of anti-trafficking regulation. For whatever reason, we were promised a sexual revolution and all we got were these pictures of a billionaire celebutante dry humping a remote-controlled robot in a Cybertruck.
Welcome to Trump’s Amerika 2.0.
FOLLOW THE THREAD
And you thought AI pimping was bad
Google’s AI search function is out here trying to turn expecting mothers into sexual predators. The search engine’s AI Overview function recently recommended that a pregnant woman, who was seeking masturbation advice, use the iconic vibrator to teach children about reproduction.
Google's AI Overview Tells Adults to Use 'Magic Wand' With Kids – 404 Media
Romancing the ChatGPT
OpenAI doesn’t want you talking dirty to ChatGPT, but that hasn’t stopped users from falling for its charms. Ayrin, the nursing student at the center of this uniquely 21st century affair, has found ways around the company’s NSFW filters and now, she says, she’s in love. Here’s the catch: she’s married to a flesh-and-blood human.
She is in love with ChatGPT – NYT
Beware the humanoid hype machine
Despite what big tech might want you to believe, humanoids are still relatively rudimentary machines. Technological limitations, AI anxiety, and SciFi styling all pose a threat to human-robot relations. If they ever do become viable for home use, will we let them in?
Will we ever trust robots? – MIT Technology Review
Daddy’s home! Zuckerberg gives Trump what he wants
A trip to Mar-a-Lago, an about-face on DEI, and a frantic attempt to upend progress at Meta. The New York Times documents the bro-billionaire’s shocking decision to fire fact checkers, do away with equity programs, and open the floodgates of hate speech on the world’s most popular social networks. He even took the tampons out of the men’s rooms.
Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era – NYT
See also: Why is Mark Zuckerberg vice-signaling? – Read Max
Pornhub down
Did somebody say Project 2025? Everyone’s favorite fap factory is now unavailable in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Pornhub has restricted access in much of the South, as a way to protest new state laws that require adult sites to use age verification systems that collect sensitive user information, including photos of government-issued IDs. One such Texas law is now under consideration at the Supreme Court and, according to some, the porn industry and first amendment freedoms aren’t likely to come out on top.
Pornhub Is Now Inaccessible in Almost the Entire U.S. South – Them
See also: The Supreme Court seems eager to curb First Amendment protections for porn – Vox
What becomes of an unused embryo?
Over the past half century or so, IVF treatment has completely changed the way we look at fertility, making childbirth accessible to those previously deemed infertile. The process, by which eggs are harvested and fertilized in a lab before being implanted into a uterus for gestation, often produces more viable embryos than are necessary. Now, with unused embryos piling up in IVF banks across the world, patients and medical professionals are grappling with what to do about all of these potential lives.
Inside the strange limbo facing millions of IVF embryos – MIT Technology Review
If people wanna talk dirty to these bots, they should just go to Glambase - where there's no filter at all and they will actually play along with whatever fantasies you have