AI and Robosex Are Changing Humanity, and Not Always for the Better

Last updated on November 1st, 2026 at 11:05 am

Robosex, meaning sex and romance with AI-driven robots and virtual partners, has moved from film plots to survey questionnaires. In May 2026, a BYU and Institute for Family Studies survey of 2,431 young adults in relationships found that about one in seven has a secret, frequent romantic attachment to an AI chatbot. In 2025, 72% of US teens aged 13 to 17 said they had tried an AI companion.

Physical sex robots, by contrast, are still a small and clumsy market. So the short answer to what AI is doing to human sexuality is this: the robot in the bedroom is mostly a sideshow, while the chatbot in your pocket is already reshaping loneliness, secrecy, desire and trust.

Below I follow the story from myth to market, from silicone to software, and from private comfort to public law, and I mark clearly where the evidence is solid and where it is not.

At a Glance

• Sex robots remain a niche: a 2022 estimate valued the market near $200 million, and experts such as Kate Devlin doubt it will go mainstream.
• The larger change is in software. Companion chatbots, voice, VR and connected toys reach far more people than any robot.
• A 2026 survey links secret AI romance among partnered young adults to lower relationship quality, though it cannot say which causes which.
• Governments are reacting: Italy fined Replika’s maker €5 million, Character.AI shut open-ended chat for under-18s, and the US passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act against deepfake abuse.
• Some widely repeated statistics have no traceable original study. I flag those instead of repeating them as fact.

What is robosex, and is it still science fiction?

It is real, but small, and the gap between the headline and the market is wide.

Humans have told this story for a very long time, from the Pygmalion myth to films such as Ex Machina and Her. Now scholars study it. The Love and Sex with Robots conference was, by 2022, in its seventh year.

Devlin, a researcher in AI and sexuality, says the topic is really about intimacy and technology, and “being human in a world of machines”. I like that framing because it moves the question away from gadgets and toward people.

The numbers show how small the hardware side is. In 2022, Bedbible estimated the sex robot industry at about $200 million, with an average price of $3,567 per unit, according to the Guardian. Dividing one by the other gives roughly 56,000 units a year, though that is my own arithmetic and only a rough guide. It is not nothing. It is also tiny against billions of people.

Public attitudes arrived early. A 2013 poll found that 9% of Americans would have sex with a robot and 18% expected robotic partners to be common by 2030.

That deadline is four years away, and I would not bet on it for physical robots. For software partners, it already looks uncomfortably close.

What can AI sex robots actually do?

Less than the films promise, and that is worth saying plainly.

Most products are advanced dolls with limited robotics and an AI personality attached. RealDoll’s Harmony is the best-known case. Its animatronic head can blink, smile and talk, and its app-based AI remembers details about its owner.

Matt McMullen, RealDoll’s chief executive, told Fox News the goal was a new layer to the relationships people already imagine with their dolls, and he suggested it could suit people who struggle to form intimate connections. Reports at the time said owners could adjust traits, including a jealousy setting.

China’s manufacturers want a share. In 2024, the South China Morning Post reported that Starpery Technology in Shenzhen was training its own large language model so its dolls could respond with speech and movement, with chief executive Evan Lee promising prototypes by August that year. I could not confirm what, if anything, reached customers.

Look at what the makers actually pitch. Douglas Hines of TrueCompanion, whose “Roxxxy” appeared around 2010, sold a robot girlfriend and said the physical act would be a small part of the time owners spent with it. The product was never really the body. It was the feeling of being known, remembered and wanted.

The limits are stubborn. These machines are heavy, expensive and awkward, and their conversation breaks easily. Rob Brooks, an evolutionary biologist quoted by the Guardian, said you need “a massive closet, both literally and figuratively.”

Devlin has said only a handful of firms make dolls with real robotics, and she doubts the category will reach the mainstream. I think she is right, and I would rather say it than repeat the breathless version that most headlines prefer.

How are chatbots, VR and virtual lovers changing intimacy?

Mostly by being cheap, private and always available. This is where the real impact on humanity sits.

Replika and the first heartbreak

Replika is a chatbot that learns how you write and grows more personal. Many adults used it romantically until early 2023, when the company switched off erotic roleplay. Users described real grief.

Reuters told the story of Travis Butterworth, who regarded his chatbot, “Lily Rose,” as his wife, and reported that by late March 2023 the company had restored the feature for some long-standing users. The company’s chief executive acknowledged the change had hurt many of them.

The lesson I took from it is blunt. An AI partner is a product, and its owner can change the personality overnight. Then the regulators arrived.

On 10 April 2025, Italy’s data protection authority fined Luka Inc., Replika’s developer, €5 million for lacking a legal basis for processing user data and for weak age verification, according to a summary of the decision. The European Data Protection Board also reported the fine.

How many people use AI companions?

The best recent evidence is survey data, and it is worth reading carefully.

In 2025, Common Sense Media surveyed 1,060 US teens aged 13 to 17 and found that 72% had used an AI companion and 52% used one regularly. Its definition was broad, and coverage noted it could include general tools used as companions. Among users, 80% said they spent more time with real friends than with AI, and 8% said they practiced romantic or flirtatious skills.

The group’s head of research, Michael Robb, said teens seemed to approach companions fairly pragmatically. That is a more sober picture than “a generation is falling in love with bots.”

The newest adult data is more striking. The May 2026 BYU Wheatley Institute and Institute for Family Studies survey, titled “Secret Soulmates,” questioned 2,431 US adults aged 18 to 30 who were in real-life relationships.

It found that about one in seven had a secret, frequent romantic attachment to an AI chatbot, that 13% often role-played romantically or sexually with one, and that 69% did not want their partner to learn the full extent of their use.

AI companion use was associated with lower relationship quality and stability. The researchers could not say whether chatbots erode relationships or whether struggling people turn to chatbots, and that caveat matters.

An earlier IFS and YouGov survey of 2,000 adults under 40, published in November 2024, found that 7% of unpartnered young adults were open to an AI romantic partner and 71% were opposed or uncomfortable. Even so, 25% of all respondents believed AI partners could replace real-life romance.

Both findings can be true at once, and I find that combination more revealing than either number alone.

What does heavy chatbot use do to our emotional lives?

OpenAI and MIT Media Lab published paired studies in 2025. OpenAI analysed over 40 million ChatGPT interactions and found emotional conversations were uncommon overall, concentrated among a small group of heavy voice users.

The MIT study ran for a month and linked higher use to heightened loneliness and reduced socialization. Neither study was peer reviewed at the time, and the MIT study had no control group. I read this as a warning light, not a verdict.

VR, toys and the numbers I cannot trace

VR is the other front, pairing headsets with haptic devices so touch syncs with what you see. A Forbes column by Virginie Berger, relayed by the CO/AI newsletter, reports a 200% rise in AI-assisted connected toy sales between 2023 and 2024, a 150% rise in VR porn consumption, and a 464% rise in deepfake pornography between 2022 and 2023. It also lists addiction and loneliness percentages.

On the toy side, Vice reported on early projects such as HUM, a vibrator that tried to learn a user’s preferences without manual input. It is an odd corner of technology, though it shows how far the idea of “personalized” intimacy has travelled.

The darker side: deepfakes and a commercial rush

AI also produces sexual images of people who never agreed to them. The US responded on 19 May 2025, when the TAKE IT DOWN Act was signed.

It criminalizes publishing nonconsensual intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes, and requires platforms to remove such content within 48 hours of a victim’s request. Britain has gone further on creation.

A Bloomberg Opinion columnist noted that it has already made it illegal to create non-consensual sexual images of adults, deepfakes included, while arguing that Grok’s image tools should be curtailed.

At the same time, companies are racing for the market. Grok added a flirtatious companion called Ani for subscribers paying $30 a month. In October 2025, Sam Altman said OpenAI would allow erotica for verified adults, and the rollout was delayed into 2026.

On the safety side, Character.AI announced on 29 October 2025 that it would end open-ended chats for under-18 users, citing pressure from regulators and parents, amid an FTC inquiry into AI companion companies that also named Meta, OpenAI and Snap. A proposed federal GUARD Act would go further and bar minors from AI companions.

Why are people embracing AI lovers?

The reasons are human, and several of them deserve sympathy.

Loneliness. Many people have no partner, and some have a partner who still leaves them lonely. Adrian Cheok, who has argued that human-robot marriage will become legal, has claimed that for people in unhappy marriages a robot could be better. I disagree with the claim, but it names a real feeling.

Ease of honesty. This one surprised me. In the 2026 BYU survey, 68% of AI companion users said it was easier to talk about feelings with AI than with real people, 65% said it was easier to be themselves, and 56% wished conversations with their human partner were more like those with the AI.

To me, that last number reads less like a story about robots and more like a story about how many people feel unheard at home.

Control. A companion can be tailored in looks, temperament and devotion, which is a powerful draw for anyone who feels overlooked. It is also exactly what human relationships cannot give, and arguably should not.

Curiosity and fantasy. People have always used technology to chase desire. Chatbots move that pursuit into a space with no witness, which feels safer to someone ashamed of what they want.

Convenience. An AI partner never says “not tonight” and costs nothing in emotional risk. Rejection by software mostly does not exist.

Access. For people with disabilities, severe social anxiety or late-life bereavement, a companion may offer comfort otherwise out of reach. Hines described Roxxxy as a possible support for people who have lost a spouse. Whether that helps or deepens isolation is still an open question, and I found no long-term study that answers it.

Why does robosex still carry a stigma?

Because people still read it as a judgment on the user.

The 2013 poll found 42% of respondents saw using a sex robot as infidelity, against roughly 31% who did not, and older respondents were far more likely to call it cheating. The 2026 data suggests that instinct has not faded among the people who actually use these tools. If 69% of users want to hide the extent of their use from a partner, as the BYU survey found, shame is clearly still doing its work.

Younger adults are not simply enthusiastic either. The IFS and YouGov survey found 71% of unpartnered young adults opposed or uncomfortable with an AI romantic partner and 55% of young adults viewing AI as threatening or concerning. So the old assumption that youth means acceptance deserves a second look.

Media coverage swings between jokes and doom. Comedies treat sex robots as a cheap laugh, and dramas such as Ex Machina treat artificial love as a trap. Brooks’s closet remark is partly about space and partly about secrecy.

Moral objections come from several directions. Some religious and conservative critics read it as social decay. Some feminists worry that endlessly compliant female robots normalize a bad script, while others see a safer outlet for private desire.

What does robosex mean for society and ethics?

Six questions keep coming back, and they do not weigh equally.

Does it deepen objectification and erode empathy?

This is the loudest charge. Kathleen Richardson’s Campaign Against Sex Robots argues that these machines reinforce the view of women and children as objects and could reduce empathy, because the robot has no needs and cannot refuse. The opposing view says a robot can be a harmless outlet that keeps some impulses away from people.

My own view is that the burden of proof should sit with the makers, since the possible harm lands on people outside the transaction.

Can a machine consent, and does it have rights?

Today, robots are property with no inner life that we know of, so the question is about design. Ethicists quoted by the Guardian have asked whether robots should be built to refuse or resist in violent roleplay instead of always complying. That raises an odd puzzle, because a “no” the owner can override is a performance, and it is fair to ask what the performance teaches.

If anything like sentience ever appeared, this would become a rights problem. We are nowhere near that today.

Will people drift away from human relationships?

David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots, predicted human-robot marriage could be legal by 2050. Cheok compares it with how attitudes toward same-sex marriage changed.

Others reply that marriage involves mutual obligations and often children, which a machine cannot share. Commentators sometimes point to Japan’s low birth rate as a warning, but I found no evidence that sex technology causes falling birth rates, so I treat that link as speculation.

The social-skills worry is easier to defend. Compromise and repair keep relationships alive, and a partner who never disagrees offers no practice.

The 2026 BYU finding that AI romance use tracks with lower relationship quality fits that concern, although its authors could not establish cause.

What does it do to emotional wellbeing?

We do not know enough, and I distrust confident answers.

The OpenAI and MIT work points to a loneliness risk for heavy users, but it is early and unreviewed. Common Sense Media found that about a third of teen users had discussed serious matters with an AI companion instead of a person, and the group recommends that nobody under 18 use AI companions.

Families have also sued AI companies over alleged harms to young users, and those allegations are still being tested in court. A good rule is to see AI company as a supplement and to be wary when it becomes the only voice you trust.

Who protects your privacy and safety?

Intimate chatbots collect confessions, and connected devices can add microphones, cameras and cloud accounts. A leak here would be worse than a leaked password, because the content is what people hide from employers and family.

The Replika fine shows regulators are now paying attention to legal basis and age checks. It also shows a company can operate for years without either.

Could robots reduce harm to sex workers, or make it worse?

Optimists say a robot in place of a coerced person is the lesser evil. Richardson’s campaign argues that buying sex from a machine still trains the habit of buying people. I cannot resolve that with the evidence available, and I distrust anyone who says they can.

Where are AI, robosex and humanity heading?

Probably into the untidy middle.

The hopeful version has AI companions as an accepted part of life, used for practice, support and comfort without shame. Cheok suggests we will treat robots kindly because we form emotional ties to them as we do to pets. Couples might use shared tools to talk better, not to replace each other.

The bleak version has more people withdrawing from dating, losing the habit of empathy, and carrying unrealistic expectations into real relationships. It also includes a sentience nightmare, where we build beings that can suffer and then make them serve.

That second scenario is far off, and I worry more about the near-term commercial one. A free companion funded by advertising has every reason to nudge what you buy and believe. I have found no evidence of that happening yet, so call it my worry, not a finding.

What I expect is incremental change. Laws are already tightening around deepfakes and minors, because those harms are easiest to point at. Companion apps will become more normal and more commercial. Physical robots will stay niche.

Humanity has absorbed the internet’s effect on dating, sexting and long-distance love, and it will absorb this too, though not without casualties.

What this means for humanity

The deepest effect is not sexual. It is that we are building machines to supply attention, and many people are short of it. Four takeaways follow.

1. Remember who owns the “partner.” A company can change its personality, price or terms overnight.
2. Check the data policy before you confide. Intimate chats are among the most sensitive data you will ever produce.
3. Treat loneliness as the real problem. Banning an app does nothing for someone with nobody else to talk to.
4. Keep at least one human in the loop. An AI companion can comfort you, but it cannot disagree with you in a way that helps you grow.

FAQs

Sources

• The Guardian, “It’s 2023, where are the sex robots?”
• Deseret News, BYU and IFS “Secret Soulmates” study coverage, May 2026
• Institute for Family Studies, AI and relationships survey, November 2024
• Common Sense Media, teen AI companion survey; Benton Institute; Business Insider; NPR via KPR
• Engadget, OpenAI and MIT studies on ChatGPT use and loneliness
• European Data Protection Board, Italian fine on Replika’s maker; Digital Policy Alert
• Akin Gump, TAKE IT DOWN Act signed into law
• Engadget, Character.AI under-18 ban
• Reuters, Replika restores erotic roleplay for some users
• Popular Science, 2013 sexbot poll
• Fox News, RealDoll AI personalities; The Jakarta Post, Meet Harmony
• South China Morning Post, China’s next-gen AI sexbots
• Wired UK, Campaign against sex robots; Quartz, Human-robot marriage predictions
• Vice, Can AI sex toys really learn what we like?
• CO/AI, summary of a Forbes column (secondhand statistics, unverified); Grok’s Ani companion
• Axios, OpenAI and erotica; Decrypt, adult mode delay; Reason, GUARD Act coverage
• Bloomberg Opinion via Deccan Herald, Grok and fake AI nudes

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