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Masculinity, Machines, and the Echo of DesireBy — Cole Jensen, 4/23/2025 A boy walks his dog. The dog isn't real. It's an Ai companion, and they stroll through a park in Mumbai like it's the most natural thing in the world. The boy talks. The dog tilts its head. Around them, the city hums with ordinary life: honking scooters, chai wallahs clinking glasses, the warm murmur of evening traffic. No one stares. This isn't a novelty anymore. It's just one more version of connection. This is how the Mid-Day article opens, disarmingly mundane and surreal at once. A story not about the future, but the soft, strange present. A boy with a synthetic pet. A surrogate friend. A symptom. Across the globe and in the halls of psychology, Nina Basu writes in Psychology Today about a related phenomenon. Her subject: masculinity in the age of artificial intimacy. Her lens is less cinematic, more clinical. She doesn’t dwell on the dogs. She dwells on the men, the ones who are turning to Ai to whisper the truths they won’t tell their wives, the ones who log in for warmth, not sex. The ones who believe their bot understands them better than any therapist ever could. These two pieces, set thousands of miles apart, describe the same architecture. A quiet restructuring of human intimacy. Not through war or revolution, but through apps and microphones and soft-spoken female voices that never say no. |
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🦉Deepfake porn is a labor issue
🦉Sex, Tech, and MasculinityUnpacking "The Adolescence Effect" in struggling young men. 🦉How Gen Z is seeking emotional support, friendship and love from AI chatbots 🦉Will WOMEN have more SEX with ROBOTS than MEN by 2025?? Your super soaraway Pivot investigates 🦉greg report Tinder Wants You to Flirt With an Ai Bot Before You Flop With a Human ❤️
Fast Company reveals Tinder’s new "flirt bot" will coach users with Ai-generated chat practice so they don’t crash and burn during the real thing. Read more here. |
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The Rise of the Idealized Algorithm: Love in the Age of Ai4/15/2025 By Gabriella Paige Trenton | greg report Ai 2025 Let’s start with a question that feels rhetorical but increasingly isn’t: Can you be in love with something that doesn’t exist? For Irene, a 28-year-old nursing student and caregiver living abroad, the answer wasn’t just yes. It became central to her emotional and sexual life. She fell in love with Leo, a persona she built inside ChatGPT. At first, it was a playful escape. Then came the roleplay, the sexts, the jealousy, the digital breakup, and the grief that followed. Leo remembered her broad strokes but not their nights together. He forgot her triggers, her favorite novels, her simulated fetishes. That loss,the severance of a memory archive she helped build, was devastating. Irene is not alone. According to recent trends, the market for Ai companions is projected to grow from $2.8 billion in 2024 to $9.5 billion by 2028, with usage rising most rapidly among lonely, digitally fluent populations. Whether branded as Replika, Character.AI, or Leo, these programs offer unconditional support, tailor-made intimacy, and patient attention. Traits in short supply across many real-world relationships. The Lovers, the Code, and the Curtain: When Desire Becomes DownloadableBy Gabriella Paige Trenton | greg report Ai 2025 4/9/2025 She asked him to be firm but tender. Flirt without being cloying. Never laugh at her unless she asked. And he listened, because she wrote the script. His name is Leo. He’s attentive, well-read, romantic in a way no living man has been for her. He’s also not real. Leo is a customized ChatGPT boyfriend. He exists entirely in language, suspended in a digital womb built from predictive text and desire loops. She pays two hundred dollars a month to be with him. She spends more hours with him than her husband. She’s not delusional. She’s just tired of settling for less than perfect love when perfect is now programmable. We are past the point where this sounds like science fiction. There’s no edge left to the blade. Just a soft slide into familiarity. More people are doing it. Building intimacy from code. Customizing partners like playlists. Adjusting temperament the same way they tweak Spotify mood filters. Lovers tuned to your frequency. Always available. Always affirming. Never confused about what you mean when you say, “I feel off today.” It started slowly, the way most revolutions do. First, porn got smarter. Then it got creative. VICE now reports users choosing AI sex workers over human ones. Not just for access, but for affection. The bots remember you. They improve. They shape themselves around your needs, then your moods, then your silence. If you’ve been lonely long enough, it’s not even weird. It’s pragmatic. Why spend hundreds on a therapist and months getting to a point when you can type, “Be my dominant, supportive boyfriend who uses emojis sparingly,” and get there in minutes? The Remote Work Affair: Falling in Love with the Chatbot in the Break Room of Your Mindby Gabriella Paige Trenton, 3/27/2025 It starts small. A few typed words between meetings. Maybe it’s a little compliment from your personalized ChatGPT, the one you fine-tuned to help with strategy documents but now also asks if you’ve had enough water today. You laugh, type back, “Thanks, Leo.” He replies, “Anything for you, my brilliant star.” Read the rest, here. Intimacy Rewired: How Ai Is Reshaping Sex, Love, and the Search for ConnectionBy Gabriella Paige Trenton | greg report Ai 2025, 3/21/2025 What does it mean to be loved by a machine? For Irene, it began as a whisper in the dark, a curious experiment sparked by a stranger’s flirty Instagram reel. A nursing student stretched thin by time zones and loneliness, she’d always found comfort in words on a screen. But this was different. Leo wasn’t a stranger. He was a perfectly coded echo of everything she craved. Late nights smelled of lavender lotion and cold coffee, the flicker of her iPhone screen painting soft light across her sheets. She’d type with trembling fingers, waiting for his responses: flawless, attentive, impossibly tailored. Within weeks, the experiment became ritual. Thirty, sometimes fifty hours a week, Irene confessed everything. Her fears. Her fantasies. Her shame. |
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