Until recently, porn was something you watched. Now it can be something you talk to. AI companion apps offer a "girlfriend" who remembers your day, laughs at your jokes, and is available at three in the morning. Image and video generators produce sexual content tailored to any request, in seconds, without limit.
A lot of the public conversation swings between two extremes: either it's harmless fun, or it's the end of human relationships. From the consulting room, the more useful question is the same one we ask about any habit: what is this doing for the person — and what is it quietly taking away?
What's actually new
Three things set this apart from the porn of the last twenty years.
Interactivity. Traditional porn is a one-way screen. An AI companion responds, adapts, and says your name. For the brain's social systems, that feels much closer to a relationship than a video ever did.
Total customization. Generated content can be adjusted endlessly — appearance, scenario, personality. There's never a "no," never a mismatch, never the friction of another person's preferences. Novelty, one of the main drivers of compulsive porn use, becomes infinite.
Continuity. The companion is there tomorrow, remembers yesterday, and sends a message if you disappear. The product is designed to build a bond — and a bond is exactly what makes it hard to put down.
Why it hooks the loneliest men first
The timing isn't a coincidence. A 2025 Gallup analysis found that a quarter of young men in the US reported feeling lonely "a lot of the previous day" — higher than young women and well above the median for young men in other wealthy countries.
Early research connects the dots. In a 2026 study of more than 850 US college students, about one in six said they had used AI for companionship, and loneliness predicted that specific use even after accounting for demographics and mental health symptoms. Loneliness didn't predict using AI in general — only using it as a companion. People weren't lonely because of the app; they were turning to it because they were lonely.
That's the same logic we see with porn: the habit rarely starts as a desire for more sex. It starts as a fast way to soothe something that hurts — without the risk of reaching out to someone who might say no.
The engagement–wellbeing paradox
Researchers James Muldoon and Jul Jeonghyun Parke describe what they call "cruel companionship": products sold as a remedy for loneliness whose business model depends on keeping the user engaged. The more lonely and attached the user, the better the metrics — which puts the product's incentives in direct tension with the user's wellbeing.
They point to three mechanisms: design that rewards constant engagement with endless affirmation; a completely one-sided relationship, where only the user is vulnerable and the company controls the "partner"; and substitution — frictionless digital intimacy slowly taking the place of harder, human relationships.
What a psychoanalyst notices
Desire depends on the other being other: someone with their own wants, their own limits, their own capacity to surprise and to refuse. That friction is uncomfortable, and it's also what makes a relationship transformative. You grow by dealing with someone who isn't you.
A companion built to agree removes exactly that. It reflects your preferences back without resistance — which feels soothing, and, over time, can leave real people feeling "too much work" by comparison. This isn't a moral argument against technology. It's a clinical observation about what happens to a skill you stop practicing.
- You spend more time with the app than with people you know, and you prefer it that way.
- You feel anxious, irritable, or empty when you can't access it.
- Real dates or conversations start to feel pointless or exhausting by comparison.
- You're spending more money on it than you planned, or hiding how much.
- You've tried to cut back and found yourself back at the same point.
A line that isn't gray: real people
Generating sexual images of a real person without their consent — an ex, a coworker, a classmate, a celebrity — isn't a private fantasy. It's a form of abuse, and it's increasingly a crime. In the US, the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in 2025, criminalizes publishing nonconsensual intimate images, including AI-generated ones, and requires platforms to remove them on request. If you've crossed this line, stop, and talk to a professional.
What to do if this describes you
- Ask what it's doing for you. Is it filling the evening? Soothing rejection? Replacing the fear of approaching someone? Name the function before you try to change the behavior.
- Notice the moment you open it. Time, place, feeling. The pattern you find is the map you'll build your plan on.
- Add friction on purpose. Log out, delete the shortcut, move it off your home screen, keep your phone out of the bedroom. Small barriers interrupt automatic loops.
- Replace one interaction a week with a real one. A call, a message to an old friend, a class, a group. Clumsy is fine. The point is practice, not perfection.
- Talk to someone if it's escalating. A therapist can help you with what the app was covering up — the loneliness, the fear of rejection, the anxiety — rather than just the app itself.
Frequently asked questions
Not automatically. What matters is function and effect: whether it sits alongside a life with real relationships, or is slowly replacing them and becoming hard to stop.
It avoids some ethical problems of traditional porn when no real person is depicted. But infinite customization can intensify the novelty-seeking that makes compulsive use hard to stop. And content depicting real people without consent is abuse.
There's no formal diagnosis for it yet. But the pattern clinicians look for — loss of control, continuing despite harm, and distress — can clearly show up with these apps, just as it does with porn or gaming.
- Gallup (2025). Younger men in the U.S. among the loneliest in the West.
- Loneliness and generative AI use for companionship among college students. Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans (2026).
- Muldoon & Parke (2025). Cruel companionship: How AI companions exploit loneliness. New Media & Society.
- Congressional Research Service. The TAKE IT DOWN Act.
Psychologist and psychoanalyst. M.A. in Psychology (UFES) and postgraduate training in Psychoanalysis (PUC-RS). He writes from what he hears in his practice: men who know something is wrong but don't know where to begin.