It’s a short one this week because I’m dealing with an unhappy puppy or more accurately an unhappy almost-senior dog who just can’t get comfortable. The same thing happened last year at this time. The vet thinks he tweaked his neck.
It’s rabbit hunting season. Our best guess is that his stalking methods—lots of standing perfectly still and staring menacingly followed by an abrupt take off and a fruitless, high-speed chase to the fence which is all of 25 feet away—may be rough on his giraffe-like neck. Don’t worry, it’s not rough on the bunnies. They always get away. (Wabbit season! Duck season!) Getting Paid to Jerk Off Could Be Fun, But AI-lationships Aren’t HealthyLast week we talked about birds being left alone to masturbate. This week we’re talking masturbation again, but we’re back to humans who now could get paid to choke that chicken (consider that my homage to the birds). Joi AI posted a job listing for “masturbation consultants.” The start-up said it planned to hire 10 people to test out its AI companion’s new guided masturbation feature. The role paid $2,000 for four weeks of work (or is it wank?). Joi AI is building an “intimacy and companionship platform.” Put another way, they’re attempting to create the perfect AI girlfriend or boyfriend or fluidfriend so that users can get all the benefits of dating without the hassle. The platform includes AI-generated avatars, voice interaction, and personalized chat experiences. The new daily masturbation feature offers a mood-matched AI voice to guide users through the exercise. The company wants the testers to provide feedback on the experience. It wants to know whether the voice really did match the mood they selected, if the session felt immersive, and whether there were lags or pauses that got in the way. The company also wants to know how the daily masturbation sessions impacted each tester’s mood, sleep, stress, and confidence. What qualifications do you need to be a masturbation consultant, you ask? It turns out, it’s not all in the wrist. The listing said the ideal candidate would be “articulate, observant, and impossible to blush.” They must also be an excellent writer. The company is looking for someone who can describe sensations “better than a sommelier describes a wine.” It sounds hard (pun intended), and the competition is stiff (pun inevitable). Over 100,000 people who were confident in their abilities to jerk and tell applied. In a follow up post, the company said it wouldn’t be checking references. “No recommendations needed, we trust your years of experience speak for themselves.” Julie Levin, Joi AI’s head of brand, said the company was overwhelmed by the response and she wasn’t sure how they’d handle all the resumes they’d received. (Really, don’t you have a chatbot for that?) But I don’t think she was complaining: the goal of the job posting was to fill the unique positions (pun unnecessary) and draw attention to the brand. It worked. I wanted to report this as a funny story about an easy gig, but to be honest, the company’s mission worries me. It’s LinkedIn profile says:
The home page of its website is a grid of pictures mostly of young, hot women. Click through and they’ll introduce themselves. There’s cowgirl Hunter Joad, blazer-clad business lady Jade, and plus-size Layla Moon who wants to read your aura. There’s a homemaker, a drag queen, a K-POP star, and a bunch of influencers. There’s someone who describes herself as a proud lesbian and someone else who want you to know he’s a straight afrobeat singer. The thing is that none of them exist. They’re not real people. They’re not even pictures of real people with fake explanations of who they are. How they look and what they say is all generative AI. They are the end results of a mathematical equation of what the perfect date or mate or fuck buddy would look like and what they’d say. Yes, they can give you a safe space for self-exploration with zero judgement and zero pressure, but “deep connection” is pushing, and none of these “people” are actually capable of love. There’s new research from the UK that found that young boys are talking to and dating AI. Researchers surveyed 1,000 boys ages 12 to 16. They found that 85% of have spoken to a chatbot and 20% had at least one peer who had “dated” an AI girlfriend. More than half of them (58%) said that AI relationships are easier because they “control the conversation,” and 25% of them say they’d prefer a bot-partner to a real human one. It makes sense. An AI chatbot says what it thinks you want to hear, rarely challenges you, and never has to hang up because she’s bored or late to dinner. She will do what you want, when you want it. She’s eager to have sex with you, and she’ll never reject you. Teenagers should be experimenting with masturbation, but they should also be experimenting with relationships. They should flirt. They should kiss. They should wonder if the other person likes them. Like like likes them. They should fool around. They should overanalyze. They should hang out. They should buy condoms. They should do it and be surprised that they’re not a virgin anymore but maybe a little disappointed because it wasn’t that big a deal. They should do it a few more times until it’s kind of a big deal. They should fall in love. They should fight. They should make up. They should overanalyze. They should break up. They should get back together against the advice of their best friends. They should do it some more. They should break up again. And then they should get back out there, a little older and slightly wiser. The order of the steps is less important than that they experience these kinds of milestones at some point. If it’s spread across a few relationships, that works too. But none of this works if the other person isn’t a person with their own needs and desires and fears. Teen relationships are meant to prepare us to be in grown up relationships where the stakes also include children and in-laws and prenups and mortgages and dogs who can’t tell you where their neck hurts. If you think about it, a relationship with a built-for-you chatbot is really just masturbation. And there’s only so much you can learn through masturbation, even if you’re getting paid for it. Sex on Wednesday is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Sex on Wednesday that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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