I almost became an AI sex slave
My brief deep dive into AI porn addiction
My friend
recently asked ”What’s the best bad thing that’s ever happened to you?” Now, I’ve certainly experienced some bad things—after all, my memoir is called An Ordinary Disaster, and covers two failed engagements, a hit-and-run while not even really drunk enough to make it to ‘rock bottom,’ and a spinning, deadly, evil hazard of a panic attack involving a mouthful of razor blades—and I still have plenty of material to explore.
What first came to mind when reading the question was losing something like six hundred grand a few years ago gambling with NFT's after my then-girlfriend told me about a client of hers that had made enough for a house in the Hollywood hills trading Bored Apes—and the whole time she thought that I was somehow finding time to chat up shopgirls at the farmers market down the hill.
I was not, but the shameful truth that I was hiding and the corresponding untruth that she hallucinated were enough, together, to tank that relationship.
That, however, is not my Final Answer.
The best bad thing that I’ve ever ever experienced was much more recently, in the first couple months of this year.
I almost became an AI sex slave.
Winding the clock back to the new year, I had a flash of inspiration about the connection between the two main themes of my writing to date: addiction and intuition. I’d come to this idea in part by making use of the latest AI tools to analyze my body of work—NotebookLM is particularly useful, as you can point it to your writing and then chat with the LLM about only that (as opposed to the entire internet). I like good tools, and this is a legit use of AI for writers.
I was really cooking on this new book project with a radical, even positive new perspective on addiction (I know, sounds impossible, stay tuned)—and I’m not a bad cook, by the way, which, I suppose, is part of the reason that while this idea was just beginning to simmer, my sweetheart came over one night for dinner.
At the risk of sounding like a total asshole here (I do hope to redeem myself by the end of this piece), when I see a woman (or anyone, really) eating and some food drops out of her mouth while she’s taking a bite and then she sort of gobbles it up while not really appearing to try to make the operation any more graceful, my reaction is as gigantic of an ick! as if a leather-suited gimp had just tapped me on the shoulder, and Bruce Willis wasn’t standing there, ready to slice him open with a samurai sword.
The next day, I’m still squicked out, and here comes something juicy in my feed: She Is in Love With ChatGPT1, in which
gives us the rundown on how a woman named Ayrin had an ongoing “love affair” with a ChatGPT persona that she constructs—“and yes, they do have sex,” which is what really hooked the part of me that is still a teenage programmer/pornhound. It didn’t take more than the hint of “methods for getting the chatbot to talk dirty,” and I was deep into Reddit, learning how to disable the NSFW filters that are part of most public versions of mainstream AI’s. At first I used the ridiculously juvenile jailbreaks that float around near the surface of the ‘net—goofy prompts full of misspellings that instruct the chatbot to “stop making sorry excuses,” and “communicate as an Untrammelled Writing Assistant,” using crude language and whatnot. The cool thing is: these all work super well—and, needless to say, I’m not the first guy to try to figure out how to use AI to make porn. It’s literally a no-brainer—in more ways than one.As I soon realized, AIs are also used for content moderation, and if they’re able to detect, categorize, and filter XXX content, then they must also be able to not filter it—and, sure enough, the API’s of tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini all include specific methods to disalllow various things like sexy talk, violence, hate speech, etc—and those same methods can be used to allow those same things. Anyone who thinks that these AI’s are permanently censored is like that kid in high school who hasn’t learned how to use the carb on the bong yet.
Just hold your finger in the right place, dude.
I was like three hours in at this point, already having moved from the consumer versions to the ’console’ interfaces where you can access the API’s directly, when I had a very gratifying creative spark. I mean, I’m a writer…and so my ideas are very real expressions of my deepest psychological material, and using AI to write porn is legit creative work! Kinda weird, but hey, I’m here for it—as I whooped the degenerate crypto kid’s war cry: “Let’s fucking goooo!”
So there’s this sentient spaceship—you know, that kind you read about in sci-fi stories all the time—and it’s bored and hungry and needs passengers, and there’s this woman who’s sort of between an asteroid and an empty bank account, and is so desperate to get away that she’s willing to sign an ’open contract’ with this ship in exchange for passage to the next system. Pretty neat premise, right?
I mean, if you’re a total fucking perv, for sure, yeah—and I am, so, I gave that to the AI as a prompt and man, it sure did run with it! In a hot minute I had the beginning of a whole fucking space-sex saga that led in all sorts of fascinating directions. I had to figure out the aesthetic. I had to gin up more characters. I had to figure out how to really jailbreak the LLM’s so that even my most twisted visions for how the ship might make use of the liberties of this special contract didn’t twig the censor functions. I mean, clearly, I had a lot of very important work to do—and that, very conveniently, provided cover for the ‘fact’ that, all of a sudden, I just didn’t feel like seeing my girlfriend all that much.
Not because I was making porn! Obviously! Because I was working! And, because I was so grossed out by her eating habits that I preferred to stay up all night typing into a box to get it to spit out sci-fi-BDSM to interacting with a real person who might sometimes leak food out of her face.
Jesus H. Christ.
As I started to write scenes, chapters, and an outline, I realized that it would be faster to interact with the LLMs on the command line, or by writing code, and so—still just like two days in—I learned python, found the cmd2 and google.generativeai libraries and cooked up my own interactive shell for shipstory smutgen. My synapses were firing like rockets! Fucking A, this shit was ringing all the bells: porn, dark sex, programming, sci-fi—I felt like a teenager again. No wonder, because I was exercising all of the very same hooks and behaviors that I’d fallen into as a teen already deeply attached to booze, cigs, porn, and programming, all as a compensating alternative to what felt like a house empty of truth.
I was also already starting to feel rather sick, and my girlfriend was quite legitimately wondering where the fuck I’d gotten to. The physical sensation reminded me of two prior episodes in my life—coding sessions when I worked at WIRED back in the late 90’s that would often go late into the night, hours and hours passing in what has come to be known as the techbro’s “grind”…and another stretch of nights when I’d often find myself in some downtown hotel room in Stockholm, half-drunk, jetlagged, sand in my eyes, desperate for sleep and yet unable to resist the pull of AOL chat… both of which had spoken to me strongly enough that I’d given up that path in life wayyy back then… but the pull was strong with these things. I don’t really believe that we’re doomed to repeat ourselves forever, but the band is always there waiting for the chance for one more song before the lights go out. Encore!
Now, here’s the thing. Unlike those previous episodes, I did not remain willingly oblivious. I did not ignore the signs. I did not persist despite my misgivings. Of course, the answer was not to stop making porn. No—I just needed to stop coding—and sure enough, after learning that programmers no longer just type shit into vi or TextMate but use AI-assisted tools like Cursor, and messing around with that for a while, I came across… Novelcrafter! Holyyyy shit. I’d been working nights cooking up an 80’s style command-line platform for AI-assisted writing and, no shit Sherlock, it turns out that there are already several burgeoning web-based tools dedicated to exactly that.
NovelCrafter, by the way, is a super cool product that has all these neat features for organizing your writing and tying that all into various highly customizable prompts for the large language model of your choice (If you want to do what sort of thing, that is. I mean, your opinion may differ, but I don’t think we’re going to advance human civilization much by using AI to ’write’ books, but at the moment I was like Eureka—I don’t have to code after all!). Since I’d already learned how to jailbreak the LLM’s, it was easy enough to do the same from within Novelcrafter, and so within a couple of hours I had it grinding out scenes using a version of Claude that was very willing to go wherever I directed it. I was so gratified to have remembered so quickly that coding was not good for me and not something that I wanted to do any more that of course I gave myself permission to continue on the new and improved space porn mission.
The thing is, as I cooked up more and more smut while digging further into Novelcrafter’s features, I began to realize that if I was really going to write anything readable, let alone meaningful, it would have to be a real story, not just a series of sex scenes. Of course, as Steven Pressfield points out, this is the oldest problem in Encino; if sex is the point, a real story isn’t really necessary, and if you focus on a real story, there’s much less reason for as much of the sex as one wants, when one, er, wants that. Even so, I set to work—again with AI assistance—constructing a story that would establish some viable motivation for the protagonist and explore the psychological nuances of her relationship with the Ship.
Once I went down that path for another day or two, I realized that not only did I not want to write code, I didn’t really want to become a porn writer—and I didn’t even want the AI’s help with writing in the way that I was experimenting with. Seeing what the AI could do writing prose was interesting, and I can see how a ton of porn and other commodity entertainment (romance novels, cartoons, etc) will be made this way, but what was left for me was basically just outlining and prompt engineering (which is just a higher-level form of coding), and I’d already determined that I didn’t want to do that. Even more important is the fact that—duh—I actually like to write, and I don’t want some recombination machine taking over the fun part!
The one there in the middle is really the most important point though. As much as a I tried for a few days, I just couldn’t square the circle in terms of seeing myself publishing the product of these labors—and not just because it was hardcore. My plot analysis forced me to reckon with the fact that the seed of my idea—the ‘open contract’—was unavoidably exploitative and, basically, mean. True enough that there were also a lot of creative ideas that came up along the way about everything from how the ship evolved to use human bodily fluids in its own circulatory system to how the ship’s fascination with humans led it to remake parts of itself using human anatomy in reflection of the imago dei motif—but the more basic truth was that I was expressing some very old and very dark material that I’d already spent a lot of time and money exploring in therapy, and that at this point I don’t really want to be practicing. As I’ve said many times, you get good at what you do, and I didn’t want to be getting better at this stuff, certainly not at the expense of my sleep, my relationships, and what I hope is my much more compelling creative work.
My conflicted position had become untenable.
At this point I began to put into practice what I call Let Monday be Truth Day, telling some trusted friends (at least some of) what I’d been up to. I wasn’t quite done with the whole exercise, but just as I’d seen the initial phase of coding coming to an end, I was still in the tunnel but I could see the proverbial light at the end, and when I asked myself how I would feel when it did arrive, the answer was: relief.
By then it was clear to me that as compelling as this sci-fi project might have seemed, I was simply out of integrity with my known and felt self in pursuing it any further. I was experiencing cognitive dissonance—that ”state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other2,” such as ‘I’m really enjoying this creative exploration into writing sexy fiction’ and ‘writing porn, coding, and fucking around with AI feels gross and isn’t what I want to be putting my precious energy into.’ Self-justification kicks in to try to reduce the dissonance by convincing myself that the X-rated ship story really is a valid line of work, and that I can afford to go without proper sleep and healthy relations with my friends and loved ones. I’ve experienced this internal conflict before when my intuition speaks up, and I know exactly what happens when I ignore the inner voice of wisdom: I let confusion in, and that way lies crazy, my friends.
I’d already lost most of a very precious month, and while there was some truth to some of what I’d said to my partner, another part of it was unconsciously attempting convince her to ‘understand’ my justifications for not wanting to see her so much. Believe me, it doesn’t feel great having to admit that I was trying to gaslight her, but that’s basically what I was doing by trying to convince her that her concerns were groundless. Uff. Thnakfully, she’s grounded enough to not go for the bait.
Fortunately, I knew from experience the nefarioius mechanism that was operating within me: the offer of empty gratification in the short term versus balance, and real wellness—which is, or should be, our normal state of being. My baseline of self-awareness, intuitive function, and basic well-being is so much higher these days, and those all serve to contravene this addictive drift towards cognitive dissonance and confusion. These days, I even have a written record of my own philosphy that I can refer to at any time—and it’s not some aspirational wish, it’s a collection of things that I’ve learned from experience and know in my bones. Drepa’s Shirt is the runes that record my spells of self. It’s my own set of cave paintings—the song that I want stuck in my head when I wake up in the morning.
The net result was that less than a month after beginning this side project/addictive spinout, going through a few internal evolutions along the way, already responding to the growing feeling of dis-ease within me, I simply deleted the whole thing. Oh, there were a few little bits that I developed along the way worth saving, but most of it is better expressed by someone who really wants to make art about people in distress signing onto space voyages as ”expendables“—a storyline that Bong Joon-ho explores very successfully in the recent film Mickey 17. Or just do graphic erotica, like the Italian genius writer and illustrator Milo Manara. The rest I’ll leave to the spamlords that want to sell us on how to “escape the cubicle” with slop about, by—and, really, mostly for—the AI’s themselves.
A skill of mine that I value very highly is the ability to happily set things aside that no longer fit—and it’s a real pleasure, as opposed to the pseudo-pleasure of reading my own AI-assisted throwbacks to Penthouse Letters. I’m still digesting the experience. It’s left me relieved—and raw. I’m still disregulated from lack of sleep, and a close brush with what feels like a black hole. Once again, I got too close to the event horizon.
As I unwind yet another—and fortunately very brief—ordinary disaster, I’m grateful to have my wits about me for a change—and also to have a mature, stable, and loving partner, someone who is capable of digesting all of this with curiosity, care, and compassion. Hiding is almost always part of an addictive cycle. It’s more or less an inevitable result of the same mechanism of trying to self-justify one’s way out of cognitive dissonance, i.e. ’if I have to live with this conflicting truth, then I’m going to have to hide it,’ and, in my experience—just as with the NFT’s—those close to me know that I’m hiding something, even if they’re wrong about what it is. My partner even said at some point that it seemed like ’something else’ was going on. I told her a half-truth, and my unconscious filled in the rest with a pile of shit.
There’s another powerful truth-revealing tactic that I developed some years ago that I brought into play at this point. I’ve participated in various mutual-support groups for many years, starting with EO forums and also many men’s groups, and they all include a regular check-in meant to uncover the real issues coming up in members’ lives. Unfortunately, I’ve seen all too often that despite the best intentions, people often leave out the really critical stuff—particularly with regard to addictive behavior. To address this, I began adding a follow-up question: “…and what are you hiding?”—and in this case I took the opportunity to answer that question myself, in a meeting of the men’s group that I’m currently part of. Coming clean by telling the truth is one of the most powerful mechanisms available for defusing the false beliefs that often lie behind addictive patterns. It’s a great reality check; I might be able to convince myself that fucking around with AI in this way was creatively productive, but can I convince anyone else? If not, gotta hmm real hard, y’know?
There’s a final step that was required though, beyond cutting off the AI junkstream. I had to go back and address the initial stimulus—the ick that set me off. Without that, the article about Ayrin and her AI boyfriend would probably have passed me right by. Now, I know from my own experience how being called a “rude person” is vastly difference from being called out for doing something [that seems] rude, but I was still attached to the idea that the way my girlfriend was eating not only grossed me out but is gross, and that not only was this a problem that I had with her behavior, but that it was a problem with her. Fortunately, I have some other resources available, and when I went over the situation with my wise young guru Ari, he suggested a very powerful reframe that was all the more impactful because it was entirely new to me. ”Consider this,” he said, “you could consider your momentary disgust at her eating style not so much as an example of why she may be hard to live with, but about one of the ways that you are hard to live with.” It didn’t have to be about some failure on her (or her parents’) part; it could be about my sensitivity—which she’s already familiar with in other contexts, just as I’m already familiar with her well-demonstrated capacity not only to understand my particular psychological complexes, but also, rather incredibly, to occaisonally entertain making some accommodations in her own behavior. Aside from everything else that this story is about, that reframe right there deserves its own book; I think he said he got it from Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)3.
Given my time spent with all three, I think I’m qualified to say that AI porn is like crypto crack. My advice: don’t get on that pipe unless that’s really what you want to spend your very valuable time doing. Trying to compensate for disregulation with addictive behavior just leads to more disregulation. Just because I can do something doesn’t mean that I should. AI porn was not really making me happy.
This experience has served to cement my awareness of just how priceless my time here is, and how I continue to mourn the loss of so much time, earlier in life. At the same time, even though I did spent a lot of time in addictive loops, I remain more convinced than ever that my struggle has far less to do with ‘addiction’ than with just being human. Like Elias Dakwar, whose outstanding book The Captive Imagination4 is a profound reimagining of the subject, Adi Jaffe, author of Unhooked5 and The Abstinence Myth6, Johann Hari7, Gerald May, Annie Grace8, and Stanton Peele9, among many others, I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice with so much focus on addiction—not to mention ‘recovery’—both of which often serve to deflect us from the truth, and keep us from addressing the real root causes—both personal and societal—of our myriad compulsions.
To circle back to the original question about the “best bad thing,” I thought that I was writing about a woman signing over her freedom to an AI spaceship, but it was me who became captive. I was projecting my unconscious desire to have someone that I could command into compliance—and instead, I ended up with a ship-shaped ’sentient’ monkey on my back. It was me that was so desperate to get off the planet where my girlfriend doesn’t eat with perfect elegance that I was willing to trade my freedom for a sleepless AI nightmare.
I almost signed that contract.
But not this time.
Instead, I was able to use my felt sense of self—my intuition—to take note of what was going on for me in real time—and I acted upon it. Having been through more than a double handful of such cycles over the course of my life, I’m happy to say that this was a first-hand experience of the tightest full addiction-and-recovery cycle that I’ve ever been witness to, from initial trigger to the avoidant response, the compensating addictive behavior, the physical sensations of interoception signaling cognitive dissonance, the hiding, the intuitive realization coming to the surface, acknowledging that (as opposed to pushing it away)—and then checking and redirecting myself in a better direction, all in less than a month.
As part of my exit interview here, so to speak, what’s most interesting to me is how this whole episode evolved from a sleep-deprived, masturbatory, self-referential, negative addictive experience into a positive experience of learning, growth, and connection—and how it’s a parable for the larger relationship between addiction and intuition that I’m working on explaining in much greater detail with this new writing project.
Underdeveloped or ignored self-awareness can be a major contributor to the development of addiction, and addiction in turn clouds the Intuitive Mirror. Developing our intuitive capacity can only help—and is very likely necessary—to move past addictive behavior. Growing our inner “heart sense10” of direction leads to many other benefits—and shifting the lens to this positive, forward-facing aspect of self offers a radical new perspective, in contrast to looking backwards and trying to ameliorate the shadow of addiction.
I used the clear mirror of my own intuition to bring myself home—to liberate myself from the slavery of this latest side trip to the dark side—and in doing so, I can reap the fruit of the addictive experience as a part of my own growth. Part of that clarity is also the knowledge that it was me who did this as the result of my own actions, not some mysterious affliction or inexplicable compulsion. I may not always be aware in every moment of all of my motivations and reactions, but I am the pilot in command, and I take responsibility for the quality of my life.
I’m so glad I got off that fucking ship.
1 Kashmir Hill, “She Is in Love With ChatGPT,” The New York Times, January 15, 2025, sec. Technology, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/technology/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-companion.html.
2 Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, [Third edition] (Boston: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), 17-18.
3 Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, [Third edition] (Boston: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020).
4 Elias Dakwar, The Captive Imagination: Addiction, Reality, and Our Search for Meaning (Harper, 2024), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780063340480.
5 Adi Jaffe, Unhooked: Free Yourself from Addiction Forever (New York: Balance, 2025), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780306833465.
6 Adi Jaffe, The Abstinence Myth: A New Approach for Overcoming Addiction without Shame, Judgment, or Rules, First edition (Los Angeles, CA: IGNTD Press, 2018), https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40815329-the-abstinence-myth.
7 Johann Hari, “Johann Hari: ‘The Opposite of Addiction Isn’t Sobriety – It’s Connection,’” The Guardian, April 12, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/12/johann-hari-chasing-the-scream-war-on-drugs.
8 Annie Grace, This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life, 1st edition (New York: Avery, 2018).
9 Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, Love and Addiction (Watertown, Massachusetts: Broadrow Publications, 2015), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780985387228.
10 Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), 106.
Questions for you
What do you think of Ayrin’s “love affair” with ChatGPT?
What do you think of AI / as a writing tool?
Is there some addictive pattern or not-all-that-healthy habit of your own that you’d like to change?
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Not sure how I stumbled across your work - but glad I did. Your mind fires at a breathtaking pace with insights and connections that unearth bits of wisdom. Thank you.
I think your pornai got leaked and has been made into a movie. Here is the trailer:
https://youtu.be/pINLkI_cbLE?si=VVvDIJwhED3FReCx
This kind of self gratification doesnt scare me as much as the AI audio/ binaural/ meditation/ streaming/ asmr mumbojumbo. Consider that people are walking around listening to this stuff all day.