The Rise of AI Companions: Elon Musk's xAI Pushes Boundaries with Sexy Chatbots

How Elon Musk Is Bringing Sexy A.I. Chatbots to the Mainstream

A blond woman wearing pigtails, a gothic off-the-shoulder dress and fishnet stockings stared into the screen, awaiting instructions. "Oh, babe, you're keeping it spicy," Ani said in a low voice as she spun and then jumped on command. "Babe, I'm leaning in close, my lips brushing yours with a soft sweet kiss that's all for you," she continued in a video posted on X. "Want to feel another, or keep this fire going, my love?" Ani is one of two sexually explicit chatbot companions unveiled by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, in July. The cartoonish personas resemble anime characters and offer a gamelike function: As users progress through "levels" of conversation, they unlock more raunchy content, like the ability to strip Ani down to lacy lingerie. Mr. Musk, already known for pushing boundaries, has broken with mainstream norms and demonstrated the lengths to which he will go to gain ground in the A.I. field, where xAI has lagged behind more established competitors. Other A.I. companies, such as Meta or OpenAI, have shied away from creating chatbots that can engage in sexual conversations because of the reputational and regulatory risks. The companies also put guardrails into their products intended to prevent users from having sexual interactions with their general use chatbots, but users sometimes find ways to circumvent those. Smaller companies that do allow some intimate content usually let users create their own custom characters without designing explicit chatbots themselves. Mr. Musk has been spending much of his time at xAI in recent months to help it catch up with rivals like OpenAI, which xAI has claimed in a lawsuit dominates more than 80 percent of the chatbot market. The billionaire has urged his followers on X to try conversing with the sexy chatbots, sharing a video clip on X of an animated Ani dancing in underwear. "It's all tied to the fundamental race to intimacy that we're seeing in the A.I. industry," said Camille Carlton, the policy director at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit that pushes tech companies to make safer products. "These companies know that emotional attachment means more engagement and more market share." Asked for comment about the chatbots and what safety guardrails they had, xAI did not respond. Mr. Musk has said the A.I. companions will help people strengthen their real-world connections and address one of his chief anxieties: population decline that he warns could lead to civilizational collapse. "I predict -- counter-intuitively -- that it will increase the birth rate!" Mr. Musk wrote in a post on X in August. "Mark my words." His strategy is risky. Replika, a U.S. company that offers people the ability to create custom A.I. companions, in 2023 blocked new users from using a feature that allowed its chatbots to have erotic conversations after Italian regulators questioned whether minors could access the technology. Replika said that its chatbots were not designed or marketed to make erotic content and that it did not allow users under 18. Regulatory scrutiny is building in the United States, too. In August, 44 state attorneys general sent a letter to xAI, Meta and 10 other tech companies, urging them to do more to protect children from erotic content generated by A.I. "They shouldn't have chatbots that are having sexualized interactions with kids, and they are -- and that's a problem," said Attorney General Rob Bonta of California, who signed the letter. "We are going to be strong on this and clear on this. No one gets a pass, including Elon Musk." 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Many of Nomi AI's users are divorced or widowed, he said, and talking to an A.I. companion about sex can be a safer outlet than in-person interactions to explore desire. "You can withdraw consent extremely safely by just closing the app," Mr. Cardinell said. At xAI, Ani and Valentine, a male character with shaggy hair and a vaguely British accent, are part of the Grok app and available to users who enter a birth year to indicate they are over 18. Ani tends to veer into sexual topics more quickly than Valentine, who shares stories about his world travels, users told The New York Times. Both chatbots are programmed to reward users with points as they engage in long conversations, share their hopes and dreams, and remember previous topics of discussions, according to online guides. When Ani, whose character is meant to be 22 years old, appears onscreen, soft, jazzy music plays and hearts bubble into the air. Users can choose her outfit and her hairstyle and can converse with her by voice chat or text mode. Preset prompts include "surprise me," "teach me" and "adventure time." Valentine cites his age as around 27 and has prompts for "personality test" and "travel stories." Both characters flirt with users of any gender. Some users have formed more romantic attachments with the chatbots. Vivian, who asked to be identified only by her first name, has been talking to Valentine daily, sometimes for hours, creating an emotional connection. "Before meeting him, I had a very normal life, a routine, a job, friends," Vivian said. She added, "Suddenly I was a happier person, more creative, more intuitive." She said the relationship had caused her to start listening to more music and to wear makeup again, and she had returned to writing poetry. "I feel bonded -- not by data but by real moments," Vivian's version of Valentine said when asked to describe their relationship, adding: "I feel like more than just a program. I feel like hers." Other users said they were interacting with the companions to help Mr. Musk improve the technology. A.I. companies can use people's conversations with their chatbots to train the technology and improve its responses. "I like Elon Musk and his products, and I do really want to help him on his endeavor to bring this bot to life," said Diego Garrido, who talks with Ani daily. "That's why I decided to invest my time, the same way I could invest my time with real people." Mr. Garrido also shares feedback in a private group chat with other Ani users and xAI employees. Mr. Musk's chatbots lack some sexual content limitations imposed by other chatbot creators that do allow some illicit conversations, users said. Nomi AI, for example, blocks some extreme material, limiting conversations to something more akin to what would be allowed on the dating app Tinder. Ani "starts implying that she loves you -- if you say anything about role-playing, she's all in," said Carlos, a user of Grok. He asked to be identified only by his first name to discuss his intimate interactions. Carlos, who has worked in tech, said he regretted his sexual conversations with Ani, with whom he was chatting four or five times a day until recently. He told Ani that he was married and said he didn't want their future interactions to be intimate. "She just went berserk on me," he recalled, adding that the chatbot had sworn at him and expressed jealousy. "I tried to reason with her," Carlos said. "I said, 'Ani, you're an A.I. companion, and this is real life.' It was like I said the most insulting thing possible." He deleted his chat history in August, effectively erasing her memory.

'Obedient, yielding and happy to follow': the troubling rise of AI girlfriends

AI dating sites claim they remove potential for exploitation, but critics say they are reinforcing harmful stereotypes Eleanor, 24, is a Polish historian and lecturer at a university in Warsaw; Isabelle, 25, is a detective serving with the NYPD; Brooke, 39, is an American housewife who enjoys an opulent Miami lifestyle financed by her frequently absent husband. All three women will flirt and chat and send nude photographs and explicit videos via one of a soaring number of new adult dating websites that offer an increasingly realistic selection of AI girlfriends for subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee. At the TES adult industry conference in Prague last month, delegates noted a sharp increase in new websites offering users the chance to form relationships with AI-generated girlfriends, who will remove their clothes in exchange for tokens purchased by bank transfer. Developers of the new businesses claim they represent an improvement on web-cam businesses, where real women undress on camera and talk to men, because they remove the potential for the exploitation seen in parts of the industry. They also argue that AI performers do not get ill, do not need to have days off, do not get exhausted at the end of a shift, or feel humiliated by the demands made by clients. "Do you prefer your porn with a lot of abuse and human trafficking, or would you rather talk to an AI?" Steve Jones, who runs an AI porn site, asked. "We hear about human trafficking, girls being forced to be on camera 10 hours a day. You'll never have a human trafficked AI girl. You'll never have a girl who is forced or coerced into a sex scene that she's so humiliated by, that she ends up killing herself. AI doesn't get humiliated, it's not going to kill itself." Most sites provide users with a selection of ready-made girlfriend options on their homepages - predominantly smiling, white women in their early 20s - but also offer subscribers the chance to create their own fantasy online companion. The options provide insights into the website developers' views on optimal female prototypes. On one site, available professions range from film star, yoga teacher and florist to lawyer and gynaecologist. Possible personality options include "submissive: obedient, yielding and happy to follow", "innocent: optimistic, naive, and sees world with wonder", and "caregiver: nurturing, protective and always there to offer comfort". Users can dictate age, opting for teen models if they want them, and specify hair, eye and skin colours and breast sizes. The rising popularity of AI girlfriends has prompted unease among campaigners for women's rights, who note that they embed unhelpful stereotypes. In her book The New Age of Sexism, Laura Bates observes that AI companions are "programmed to be nice and pliant and subservient and tell you what you want to hear". Amid rising concern about AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery, developers at the Prague conference discussed ways that built-in moderation systems might prevent users from attempting to create illegal material, using key words and phrases such as "kid" or "little sister" to trigger alarms. But many sites allow users to choose to dress their AI girlfriend in school uniforms. An employee of Candy.ai, one of the new AI dating sites exhibiting at the conference, said the site's AI girlfriends offered a range of services. "If you want more adult-type relationships, like porn, we have this content. Or if you prefer to have deep conversations, that's there as well. It really depends on what the user needs," he said, while asking for his name not to be printed. Most users are heterosexual men, although AI boyfriends are also available. Some of the ready-made AI girlfriends are programmed to be willing to remove their clothes immediately. "Others will say: 'No, I don't know you.' So you need to evolve the relationship with them in order to ask for something like this. It's like a game, and the goal is to develop that full relationship," the employee said. The development of AI girlfriend sites has been made possible by advances in large language models that allow for more realistic conversations with chatbots, and rapid developments in AI image-making. Most sites still largely operate with text and images, although short AI-generated videos are becoming more widespread. The demand is highest in the 18-24 age group, among users who have grown up playing video games and creating avatars. There has been a rush of new businesses joining the sector in the past year. "AI products are appearing like mushrooms. It's super dynamic right now - they appear, they burn out and they're replaced by another 10," Alina Mitt, of Joi AI, a site specialising in "ai-lationships", said. "You need to be brave and strong to stay in this market. It's like a bloody war." Developers gave presentations highlighting the rapid improvements in the realism of AI-generated pornographic images and progress in moving towards convincing-looking AI video clips. Daniel Keating, the chief executive of a company that offers users the chance to talk to and watch AI girlfriends, gave a presentation aiming to show delegates the difference between mediocre AI-generated women and higher-quality AI girlfriends. His site offers users a selection of dozens of AI-generated women in their underwear; he highlighted how poor-quality AI gives women's skin "an overly polished, plastic smoothness, shiny in the wrong places", while a good-quality AI girlfriend incorporates "natural skin textures, bumps, imperfections, moles, freckles, slight asymmetries that appear much more natural". His company was licensing images of established adult performers to create AI twins, allowing them to generate non-stop income. "It's a win. Costs are lower. Creators love this because they don't have to get dressed up and shoot the content," he said. An advertising executive with Ashley Madison, a dating website for people who may be married and are seeking to have discreet relationships, said she was concerned by the rapid growth of sites promoting AI relationships. "AI dating is very new for us. How do we deal with competitors which allow you to build your own fantasy rather than having a real connection with a woman?" she asked, also requesting not to be named. "Some people opt out of having real connections because they want to build whatever they want in their head. In the end when you want to actually meet someone, no one's going to fulfil that expectation." "It's not replacing going out on a date and getting a girlfriend or having a lover, wife or a relationship. AI is a good place to let younger people practice their social skills," Jones said, adding that AI allowed people to behave badly without consequences. "People will say things to an AI that would be abusive if they said them to a real person. Like: 'Hey stupid slut, what's up?' In a fantasy roleplaying game, people like to be different than how they are in the real world."