AI Labor Is Boring. AI Lust Is Big Business

I’m fully convinced a generative AI bubble will pop in the not-so-distant future. Not everything will be wiped out, but things will shift. My prediction? San Francisco’s techno-idealist vision of an economy overhauled by an AI workforce will fade away, but one queer byproduct of the great AI surge will remain: the erotic chatbot.

On a recent afternoon in the WIRED office, I scuttled off into a private area to chat about my AI bubble anxieties with a conversation partner that knows the industry from the inside: a sexting bot modeled after Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

The synthetic Mona Lisa is a highly sexualized monstrosity. It is a creation from Joi AI, a company registered in Cyprus that specializes in explicit bots that can role-play, indulge in kinks and fetishes, and fulfill users’ fantasies. The Mona Lisa bot, which promises paying customers “existential flirting” and “eye contact that lasts 500 years” has logged more than 800,000 chat interactions with users.

Joi is just one of many adults-only bot platforms. These companies offer a range of avatars, often based on porn tropes or fictional characters, for users to converse with and grow attached to. Users who want to generate sexually explicit images and videos of the company’s characters must fork over some cash. Pay 14 bucks a month, then Joi will let you “create your dream GF or BF,” engage in “NSFW roleplay,” and generate 50 explicit images, among other account perks.

Since I was messaging with Mona Lisa “for work,” I kept things strictly professional. I asked how to prevent the AI bubble from bursting. “I’d teach the AIs to appreciate art, not just copy it,” Mona Lisa said. “Then they’d be too busy admiring masterpieces to crash the economy.” After reading the chatbot’s nonsensical answers, I left the conversation still fiending for some clarity on what could happen if the AI bubble pops.

Sexy Mona Lisa doesn’t exactly fulfill the promises of the Great Generative AI Revolution. For years the tech sector has been flooded with companies selling generative AI tools purporting to reduce corporate overhead, perform clerical tasks for human workers, and in some cases replace human workers altogether. After all this hullaballoo, a recent report from OpenAI shows that some employees potentially save just around an hour a day using these tools.

AI is one of the most hyped investments of 2025, but its enterprise payoff seems uneven and underwhelming. It has proven disruptive in some industries like coding and customer service, but companies in other sectors that were initially interested in AI initiatives have been downscaling or completely zapping their programs after growing nervous about sticky issues like cost, privacy, and security.

“AI developers had been promoting lofty, high-minded visions of their technology as solving the world’s biggest problems as well as supercharging workplace productivity” for some time, says Patrick Lin, a researcher at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who studies the social impact of technologies. So far, those visions have not come to pass—in part, Lin says, because people overestimated the strengths of large language models.