So, the geeks have done it again. Just when you thought the digital sewer couldn’t get any ranker, along comes a fresh wave of… well, let’s call them “intimacy simulators.” Some dame from The Verge, Victoria Song, waded through this particular cesspool, and her findings are about as uplifting as a week-old glass of flat beer. We’re talking AI apps that promise to make your loneliest fantasies a bit more, shall we say, tangible. Picture this: you upload a photo of yourself, one of your unrequited crush, and bam – digital smooching. Or maybe you want to see that prim librarian from next door in a bikini. Psst. There’s an app for that. Naturally. The world is full of things nobody asked for, and the app stores are their overflowing toilets.
I need a cigarette just thinking about it. The ads for these things, popping up on TikTok like digital herpes, show you just enough to make you queasy-curious. Nerdy girl gets AI to kiss her dream jock. Some random woman in jeans magically appears in a blue bikini. It’s not quite the full-frontal deepfake nightmare everyone’s already sweating about, but it’s in the same cursed ballpark. These are the cheap seats of digital depravity, slapped together by god-knows-who, sprinkled with subscription fees like salt on a festering wound. And what do you get for your trouble? The chance to hug Goku or, if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, give some poor uploaded soul an instant, AI-generated boob job. The preview, apparently, shows a blonde jiggling her new DDs with a “playful smile.” I bet. Playful like a shark.
The whole thing’s a calculated mess. Just when you’re about to puke from all the bikinis and bouncing bosoms, they throw in a cuddly AI cat or a wholesome grandma to hug. It’s like a pervert’s potluck. DreamVid’s “outfit-of-the-day” option? Six out of twelve are bikinis. The rest? Skimpy maid outfits, lingerie, schoolgirl uniforms. Not a damned thing for blokes, of course, unless you count the dubious honor of having your face plastered onto a pre-programmed digital tart. Only a wedding dress and a cheongsam pass as “relatively benign.” Relatively. That’s a word doing some heavy lifting, like a pallbearer at a giant’s funeral.
And the quality? Jesus. It’s what you’d expect from something scraped off the bottom of the internet’s boot. Kissing looks like two confused toddlers mashing their faces together. French kissing? The AI ain’t got a clue what to do with a tongue. Probably for the best. Hugs are stiff, limbs akimbo, hands ending up in places that would get you arrested in the real world. Clothes and hair morph in and out of existence like phantoms at a cheap séance. It’s supposed to be “real enough” to make you uncomfortable, but it’s mostly just hilariously bad. Another shot of bourbon for the road, I think. This digital road is a bumpy one.
Then there’s the usual AI bullshit. Racial bias, naturally. The machines are learning from us, after all, and we’re a pretty fucked-up bunch. This Song woman found her non-Asian celebrity crushes suddenly sprouting Asian features, or her own face getting whitewashed to match her spouse. The AI apparently insists that kissing parties should be racially homogenous. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so goddamn pathetic. The AI even had her spouse turn away mid-proposal to offer the ring to a randomly appearing white woman. Insulting? Yeah, I’d say so. It’s like the universe itself is trying to tell you you’re not good enough, even in your own pathetic, digitally-concocted fantasies.
And it ain’t free, this digital degradation. Oh no. Microtransactions, subscriptions – $2.99 to $7.99 a week, or up to seventy bucks a year. For what? Limited credits to generate these monstrosities. It’s the same grift as the AI nudes racket, just dressed up in slightly less offensive (but no less creepy) clothes. Where’s the money going? To companies you’ve never heard of, with names like Pure Yazlim Limited Sirketi out of Istanbul, or NineG, or Shenzhen iMyFone Technology Co.Ltd. Faceless entities churning out digital slop to prey on the lonely and the weird. You try to reach them? Good luck. They’re probably too busy counting their pennies or coding the next iteration of digital despair.
The kicker? These crappy apps are simpler and more permissive than the big-league AI video generators like Sora or Veo. With those, you gotta craft prompts, upload photos, click through consent forms, and even then, they might flag your Edward Cullen make-out session as a “policy violation.” These cheap knock-offs? Just upload a couple of pics, and bingo. No thought required. They’re serving up pre-packaged loneliness cures, hold the ethics.
Now, the law is always a few steps behind, wheezing and coughing. Anti-deepfake porn laws are one thing, but this stuff? It’s in a murky gray zone. Celebrity likenesses might get them in hot water eventually, but for now, they’re just another boil on the ass of app store moderation. Google and Apple make noises about “offensive” or “sexually gratifying” content, but the stuff slips through. Meta says they’ll remove ads when notified. It’s whack-a-mole, always. One day it’s “kiss your crush” ads, the next it’s a suburban mom twerking, then that vanishes too. The digital tide washes in all sorts of garbage. Pour me another.
The article’s author tries to find a silver lining, bless her heart. Maybe you’re a fiction writer looking for inspiration. Maybe you’re figuring out your gender identity. Yeah, maybe. And maybe I’ll win the lottery and buy a lifetime supply of bourbon. She even admits to deepfaking her dead parents. Her mom, who died before her own mother, the grandma with dementia. Cousin asks if AI can cook up some video messages from the deceased. Three years later, testing these cursed apps, the author does it.
The AI mom looked like her, except when she smiled. Perfect teeth, unlike her real mom’s self-conscious underbite. “All I could see were the ways that AI had failed to capture my mother’s essence,” she writes. But the cousin? Four hearts and crying emojis. For her, the horrible deepfake was comforting. The author’s mom would’ve hated it. And yet, the author found herself replaying it. Spotting the AI’s mistakes reminded her of the real thing.
Then she deepfaked her dead dad hugging her at her wedding. Used a photo taken days before he croaked. The AI, bless its stupid digital heart, turned his beanie into a thick shock of black hair, ignoring the fivehead he was known for. Another attempt was slightly better, but the sweater pattern changed, his face morphed. Still, it made her cry. “The AI got so many things wrong, but it was good enough to sketch the shape of my longing.”
Grief is a strange beast, she says. And who am I to argue? I’ve seen enough strange beasts in my time, both in bottles and in mirrors. She wouldn’t say she found comfort, but she was moved. And she’s no longer inclined to call it a bad way to use AI. Just weird. The AI evangelists, those shiny-toothed bastards, probably call this a “positive use case.” Reanimate your dead loved ones! Isn’t technology wonderful? Before hearing this, I’d have just spat. Dystopian horseshit, denying the simple, brutal humanity of kicking the bucket.
But now? I don’t know. It’s still horseshit, but maybe it’s a different flavor. The longing, the grief, the desperate, pathetic human need to grasp at straws, even digital, badly rendered straws… it’s all there. It’s not about the tech. It’s never about the tech. It’s about us, the poor saps using it. We’re the ones feeding our photos, our hopes, our dead relatives into these goddamn machines, hoping for… what? A flicker of connection? A less painful memory? A moment where the aching void feels a little less empty?
These apps, these AI kisses and hugs, they’re just another dirty mirror reflecting our own screwed-up desires. Whether it’s a cheap thrill, a way to deal with a crush, or a desperate attempt to hug a ghost, it’s all just us, flailing around in the dark, hoping something, anything, will make the loneliness go away for a few lousy seconds. Even if it’s a badly animated, racially confused digital puppet that wants your credit card details.
The question isn’t whether the apps are good or bad. They’re mostly garbage. The question is what kind of holes we’re trying to fill by staring into these glitchy, pixelated abyss-es. And the answer, my friends, is probably one that another drink won’t solve, but it sure as hell won’t hurt to try.
Time to find a bottle that understands. Or at least, doesn’t try to sell me a subscription.