While the fulfillment of sexual desire has always fueled technological progress, and VR strip clubs and porn have been around as long as virtual reality itself, AI sex toys are still pretty nascent. But as sex-toy entrepreneur Brian Sloan can attest, the desire for such products is incredibly strong — so strong, in fact, that consumers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the “Autoblow A.I.,” an AI-enhanced version of his popular masturbators, the “Autoblow” and “Autoblow 2.”
Not exactly where your mind went when you saw A.I. Artificial Intelligence right?
To help us navigate this brave new world of A.I. blow jobs, I sought out Sloan to better understand how a motorized sucking machine might actually feel as real as another human being going down on you.
One Man’s A.I. Sex Toy Is Another Man’s…
“Different makers of sex toys may place different meanings to what an A.I. sex toy is, especially as the technology evolves,” Sloan explains. “In our case, it meant using machine learning to conduct a study of the movements of the blow-job giver’s mouth on the receiver’s penis that occur during blow jobs.”
It’s Gonna Feel Very Porn-y
“We hired people to watch about 1,000 hours of porn videos,” says Sloan. “They pulled out 109 hours of blow jobs and manually input data about the movements occurring during the blow jobs by watching the videos at half speed and using a mouse to move a drawing of a head on a drawing of penis (the blow-job tracker) to track the movements. We built a program that took 30 screenshots per second of the video, connected those screenshots to the data from our blow-job tracker and ran machine learning on a dataset of 1 terabyte of tagged blow-job images.”
And Voila, Your 10 A.I. Blow Jobs
“Each of the [Autoblow A.I.’s] 10 experiences comes from our machine-learning study. We programmed these modes based on the techniques we learned. We found that pauses are an important part of blow jobs, so three of the modes include pauses. The machine will stroke for a certain number of seconds, and then stop for a second or two, before restarting,” Sloane explains.
“Other modes focus on the top of the penis, the bottom of the penis or a combination of the two,” he continues. “Some modes mix together full strokes with short strokes focusing on the tip of the penis, with changes in speed. Finally, the full A.I. mode puts the techniques together in a different way every time it’s selected so that the user never has to suffer the same blow job twice.”
The Mechanics Behind the Sucking
“Autoblow A.I. uses a small computer that moves the penis gripper that pulls and pushes a silicone sleeve,” Sloan says. “The gripper holds the sleeve in a way that moves the sleeve itself up and down, causing a lot more friction for users, in a more human way. Long story short, the way our device pulls the sleeve over the user’s penis recreates the gliding action that occurs during a blow job with the giver’s mouth and hand. The sensations it delivers are more humanlike than those delivered by any other male sex toy.”
The Audience Has Spoken (And It Really Wants An A.I. Blow Job)
When Sloan launched Autoblow A.I.’s crowdfunding campaign last October, his fundraising goal was $50,000; yet within a month, more than $240,000 had been pledged — nor has the support stopped. “Indiegogo allows us to continue pre-selling even after the 60-day campaign ended,” he says. “Since the campaign finished, we’re still selling $1,000 to $4,000 a day of our machine. Men pre-purchase the device itself for $150 (it will be $250 at launch), and many people add accessories like extra sleeves or storage cases. So far, we’ve sold to men in 52 countries totaling $423,000.”
He adds, “Men want the technology because they’re tired of being sold the same 1980s masturbators in new packaging. Most companies in our industry are lazy and have relied on repackaging old ideas for decades. Men caught on, and they know that technology has made more realistic experiences available and they actively search for better devices like ours.”
The Future of Jerking Off — via A.I. or Otherwise — Is Mostly About I.P.
“This is a patent-heavy area, and it will depend on who gets which patents,” Sloan explains. “I’ve applied for several, and I know several other companies have done so as well. It sounds strange, but once the dust settles, the patent holders will essentially decide how men will masturbate. Ten years from now, it’s very possible that your masturbation devices will behave differently based on how you respond to its actions. Personally, though, I only ever think about the next three to five years, and in that time frame, I think it’s possible we’ll see a couple of sexual products that may begin to learn user’s preferences and then act in different ways for different users.”
In other words, at least in terms of getting off, your hand may soon be a thing of the past.
Tierney Finster
Tierney Finster is a journalist, screenwriter, actor and model from Los Angeles, California. She is a contributing writer at MEL, specializing in love, sex, mental health, drugs, queer culture and the cannabis industry. She has written for publications such as Playboy, Purple, Dazed and Confused, Jezebel and Broadly and was the key researcher behind Sex On, HBO’s revival of its iconoclastic docu-series Real Sex.
