THE POWER of artificial intelligence has shuttled into the sex toy industry.
A male sex toy brand effectively put a smart speaker on an oral sex machine.
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Data scientists programming the Autoblow used nearly six full days worth of pornographic footage to determine how the fleshy mechanical sleeve should operate.
Six days’ worth of data is a lot of AI power – for comparison, an AI dog learned everything it needed to know about walking in one hour.
The latest version runs for $229 and has six voice commands and savable experiences.
The business has raised almost $800,000 in its most recent crowdfunding bid.
For a product built on taboos, major content houses have given the Autoblow a ton of airtime.
The device appeared in an episode of the FX show Dave, in conversation on the Joe Rogan podcast, was profiled in a jokey TechCrunch column, and got its own How Its Made webisode.
Howard Stern called Autoblow creator Brian Sloan a “sex toy tycoon” and for his part, Sloan has taken on the role without self-delusion.
Sloan explained to Business Insider “The kind of person who would dislike me or not want to know me because of what I do is also coincidentally not the kind of person I would want to know.”
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Sloan was pursuing a career in law when he went on a winding journey to the sex toy business.
He had made a profitable side hustle out of flipping antiques from across the world, before eventually moving to China while selling latex.
“The adult industry was particularly ripe to ‘disrupt’ because of the combination of unusually high profit margins combined with industry-wide poor e-commerce knowledge,” Sloan told Business Insider in 2014.
Sloan planned to outmaneuver competitors by winning the e-commerce battle from the beginning – he named the company he founded in 2008 Very Intelligent E-Commerce Inc.
Products like the Autoblow AI are fueling the slow-speed collision between AI and sex.
David Levy, a doctor of social robotics, thinks AI robots will fully integrate into human’s social and sex lives by 2050.
