You might remember a few months ago, an AI startup posted a job listing looking for 10 “masturbation consultants,” offering to pay $2,000 a month to test out what it called a “Daily Guided Masturbation feature.” Well, it turns out they did, in fact, find 10 people (in fact, they found 150,000 hopefuls) and logged 134 separate sessions with the help of an AI-generated self-pleasure sherpa.
The company, Joi AI (a play on the porn abbreviation that is short for jerk off instructions), is primarily offering companion chatbots oriented toward sex. But it’s positioned itself as offering masturbation as a self-care routine. “One of the most widely practised stress interventions on earth, used by hundreds of millions of people for relaxation — yet very obscure in the wellness industry,” the company wrote in its “lab report” that it generated after having its consultants spend a month tracking their pre- and post-orgasm mood.
Joi AI’s theory seems to be the reverse of the no-fap movement. Instead of asking people to abstain from masturbation for mental and physical health reasons, according to an account from one of the consultants provided to Wired, the company asked its consultants to jerk off every day of the week (except Sunday, the Lord’s day) and engage in an “AI-guided wellness ritual” with one of the company’s chatbots during two of those sessions per week.
The findings of Joi’s experiment, shock of all shocks, proved their thesis: Stress dropped 25%, focus increased 17%, and mental restlessness declined 19% after a masturbation session (according to self-reported data from the participants).
Joi also claimed that “45% of consultants reported being creatively inspired during a session — a fresh idea, a solution to a problem, or a resolved decision that had long been sitting unmade.” How you land on “45% of consultants” when there are 10 of them is a question that needs the kind of creative solutions only a masturbation break can provide.
Joi’s big claim beyond “masturbation is good,” is that its AI companions are as good as the alternatives. “AI-guided masturbation produced satisfaction scores comparable to every other method tested,” the company claimed. And, by its data, that is true. Joi’s guides scored a 7.22 out of 10. Notably though, all of its comparisons—toys, porn, and fantasies—scored higher. It’s a bit damning that the AI companion tool is supposed to be a fully personalized pornographic experience that makes a person’s fantasies a “reality” and the people they are paying are like, “It’s kinda better without the AI.”
It might be because the experience of using Joi’s app seems manipulative, bordering on exploitative. Per Wired’s report, one of the consultants said that some of the AI personalities required courtship before they would do anything sexual, and that was done by asking for gifts, which could be purchased with in-app currency that users have to buy with real money. That same currency can be used to “buy” explicit photos, videos, and other custom content of the AI models.
Joi has positioned itself as attempting to address male loneliness and is leaning into a wellness angle with this study. But it gives itself away elsewhere. On the “About” page on the company’s website, there is giant text that says, “F#$K dating, welcome to AI-lationships” and it claims to offer a way to “find love, sex and romance without the hassle of dating.”
A more honest description might call it an isolation machine weaponizing the language of wellness while extracting cash from customers it knows to be vulnerable because that is who they target. But that doesn’t really play as well on the “About” page.
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