Boys using 'AI girlfriends' to design a personal porn partner, conference hears

Ruth Breslin, director of the Sexual Exploitation Research Programme (SERP) at UCD, said this development should give people 'great cause for concern'. Picture: Naoise Culhnae

Some teenage boys are using ‘AI girlfriends’ to create their own lifelike online porn partner, a conference on sexual violence has heard.

Users can choose from a menu of body shapes, voices, and skin colour and can request a video of their ‘girlfriend’ performing any sex act they want.

Researchers said that boys could take a photo of any real girl from their social media accounts and use that image in the software to create their fake girlfriend.

Ruth Breslin, director of the Sexual Exploitation Research Programme (SERP) at UCD, said this development should give people “great cause for concern”.

She said AI girlfriends allowed users to select the type of relationship preferred and that “stepsister” was the most popular.

Ms Breslin was addressing a conference on technology, pornography, and sexual violence, organised by Ruhama, which provides services to women in the sex trade and victims of human trafficking.

The conference was addressed by health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, justice minister Jim O’Callaghan, and Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly, and saw the launch of Ruhama’s annual report for 2024.

The conference also heard:

• Dublin Rape Crisis Centre was seeing a rise among female clients of “strangulation, suffocation, and anal rape” and said these were direct consequences of viewing extreme pornography, readily available online;
• Research being conducted in Europe, including in France and Spain, was showing a “huge rise” in sexual violence on young people by young people.

Ms Breslin said online pornographic material of women being “slapped and strangled” during sex was “becoming normalised”. She also said there was increasing use of teenagers in adult pornography, which was fuelling the demand for child sex-abuse material.

She said SERP was conducting research in second-level schools, which had revealed the popularity of ‘AI girlfriends’.

Ms Breslin showed images of the women, noting they were “very real” looking. She said there were no age restrictions for accessing the programme and it could be accessed for free.

She said users can choose from a range of characteristics and body types and could also select the type of relationship.

She said this was concerning as they could select ‘work colleague’, but also ‘stepsister” or ‘stepmom’.

She said: “You can ask AI to send a short video of the woman performing any sex act at your command.”

She said there are voice options too, where the voice can be dominant, seductive, or submissive. She said people can also choose skin colour, but shocked those present when she said that, when you go to select, there is an image of a face covered in semen.

Ms Breslin said you could have a situation of a 14-year-old boy who might be too shy to talk to a girl he likes in his class, but can take her photo from social media and put it into the AI Girlfriends app.

She said surely this should be a “great cause of concern”.

Mr Kelly said under legislation introduced in November 2023, non-fatal strangulation causing serious harm became an offence and that, to date, more than 60 cases had been prosecuted.

There is an emerging normalisation of violence and sexual violence against women.

He added that it involved the “dehumanisation” of girls and women.

He said it was “exposing” men and boys to violent and extreme sexual acts, which in turn presented the risk of them perpetrating these crimes themselves.

He said it had a “very corrupting” influence, particularly on boys and men.

AI was creating more realistic deep fakes, he said, which were contributing to more harassment and revenge porn.

Rachel Murrogh, chief executive of Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, said they were seeing more cases of “strangulation, suffocation, and anal rape” and said these were “direct downstream consequences” of extreme pornography.

She said she wanted to see the Government say it was going to tackle the tech companies “head-on” but said that she does not feel there is any “urgency” about this generally in society.

She said she “can’t understand” why the tech companies in Ireland can’t be tackled, adding that the State is able to do this for tobacco, alcohol, and obesity.

Denise Charlton of Community Foundation Ireland said the tech firms were unregulated and were “running rampant”.

It’s a terrifying time and a terrifying time for young people, who are the future.

She said society “owed it” to them to tackle this issue.

The Ruhama report shows a 75% increase in the number of people engaging with the charity in 2024, including a 35% rise among victims of human trafficking and a 20% rise among those impacted by prostitution.

It said its office in Limerick engaged with 114 people last year. It said its service in Cork opened in 2024 and dealt with 37 people in outreach activity.

Seán Cooke of Men’s Development Network said was a “crisis of confidence” among men to get involved in this area and said there was a “fear of feeling judged”.