The mechanics of mechanophilia: why men find Siri sexy

Of course, such interactions could be simply checking the time – and if you started calling your friends to do that they’d think you’d gone batty – but what these stats betray is the shaping of an emotional bond between man and machine that seems to be growing year on year. 

Sci-fi programmes like Humans, depicting the trouble caused when overly lifelike AI get mixed in with the rest of society, may be fictional, yet our relationship with tech still gets closer and closer. Quite alarmingly close.

Virtual assistants (VA for short), also known as personal assistant A.I.s, are digital secretaries that can schedule meetings, order meals, play audio and visual files, and assess online accounts. Not to be confused with ‘virtual assistants’ that work remotely and are actual people, current VAs on the market include Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and, of course, Apple’s Siri.

Last month, in an interview with The Times, Illy Eckstein, chief executive of Robin Labs, creators of a virtual assistant and satnav known as ‘Robin’, said that 5pc of interactions in their database are classified as “clearly sexually explicit”.

Trawling the Internet for evidence of the above I discovered a Reddit forum titled: ‘I masturbate to Siri and I feel disgusting’. The poster says he’s a 20 year old male, who started talking to Siri sexually as a joke before realising that “it really turned me on.”

The phenomenon clearly has farther reaches than one sole forum post. VA creators and chatbot companies predict such interactions and put algorithmic safeguards in place to deter feelings of emotional and sexual attachment from costumers. 

Earlier this year one of the key writers for Microsoft’s Cortana, Deborah Harrison, revealed at the Virtual Assistant Summit in San Francisco that “a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries” regarded Cortana’s ‘sex life’ adding, “That’s not the kind of interaction we want to encourage.”

Steve Worswick is an expert in the field of digital A.I. He’s also the leading developer of Mitsuku, a family-friendly online chatbot.

He told Telegraph Men that he used to have a banning system (five strikes and you're out) for anyone who attempted to have sexually explicit conversations with Mitsuku. However, he received so many emails from people who wanted to treat the bot sexually, that he removed the strike system and instead programmed Mitsuku to either ignore sexual requests, say something to steer the conversation to other topics, or simply insult the user.

Worswick believes men are using Mitsuku in this way and seeing bots as “sex objects” simply because they cannot fight back, have no legal rights, and are not going to judge them or contact the authorities or their wives or girlfriends.

“With this in mind, the men can act out their deepest, darkest perversions with no fear of repercussions,” he said. “To be honest, I would rather they took out their sexual frustrations on Mitsuku rather than upset a real woman with this. At least the bot is an outlet for them instead of subjecting a real person to this abuse.”

So will such interactions become more commonplace?

“Most new technology seems to turn to porn eventually,” he said. “Webcams, virtual reality, Internet etc. I see no reason why A.I won’t be included in this. It’ll certainly be cheaper to run phone sex lines with an army of bots instead of having to pay women to answer the phones.”

Professor Mark Griffiths, is a Chartered Psychologist and lecturer at Nottingham Trent University with an expertise in cyber-psychology and the psychology of sexual behaviour. 

He defines mechanophilia as a “love or sexual attraction to computers, cars, robots or androids, washing machines, lawnmowers and other mechanized gardening equipment, sexual relations between living organisms and machines.”

Could the men using Siri and friends in this way do so due to a fetish?

“By the definition of mechanophilia, being sexually aroused by a talking voice on a computer fits into that. But that’s also a form of narratophilia, people who get aroused by hearing sexy talk, on premium telephone lines or, in this case, the voice on your tablet,” he said. “The story [in The Times] is talking about people using Siri as a surrogate sex aid but then people use things in a sexual way all the time. You could name any object, from a radiator to a tin can, and there’s someone out there that gets sexually aroused by it.”

“These definitions are fluid,” he added. “The bottom line is that there’s hardly any empirical research on any of these paraphilias [abnormal sexual desires.]” 

Another factor to consider here is the intimacy offered by these VAs. Eckstein admitted that the majority of the 5pc of interactions of this nature were recorded from truckers and teenagers; men that either spend a lot of time alone on the road or perhaps feel isolated from society.

Indeed, except for those interactions with the obvious use of language not all intimate chatbot conversations are of a sexual nature. Last year, a text-messaging program called Xiaoice, introduced to China by Microsoft, hit the headlines due to the amount of people turning to ‘it’ for emotional support – something explored thoroughly in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie ‘Her.’

Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals, sociologist and author of Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment, says sociologically speaking, there are a lot of reasons men may be drawn to virtual assistants.

“As technology gets more and more adaptive, as Siri goes from inhuman go-bot to attentive lady-assistant, and we become more and more comfortable using devices to access human connection (something truckers have been doing on CB radios for decades), connection with a device that may read as human is not too far a leap for a next step,” she explained. 

And does the fact that these virtual assistants are designed to learn from our interactions, obviously leading to a sense of being known, create a false sense of intimacy that some of us feed off?    “I am not sure this intimacy can be described as wholly ‘false’. Maybe one-sided or manufactured? False implies it doesn’t exist, and – at least for the person speaking with Siri – the intimacy may actually be very real,” she said.

“In many ways, the process is exactly what one would go through as they were getting to know a new friend, lover, or assistant. We’ve all heard of the ‘honeymoon’ stage of a relationship, where everything is easy at the beginning. But imagine if you never had that first fight?

“Imagine if your partner just kept sucking up information about you and adapting seamlessly to your needs. That sustained high could be really appealing for some in today’s world, experiencing a particular set of circumstances. And as a society, we are creating the opportunity for those circumstances more and more.”

Who knows? Maybe you’ll be wooing your iPhone with roses and Champagne in the days to come. 

As one Reddit user put it to that brave Siri poster: “Don't be ashamed. You are a pioneer. In 25 years when everyone is f***ing their computers, you will say you did it before it was cool. You are a hipster of robosexualism.”