The brave new world of cyber-brothels 

It’s something out of an Aldous Huxley novel. Berlin, Germany, is home to the first “multidisciplinary” approach to brothels using artificial women, which combine virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies. It’s called a cyber-brothel.  

The concept of artificial women is hardly novel. But cyber-brothels are capitalizing on rapidly developing AI to make what creator Philipp Fussenegger hopes will be a “sustainable” model of “AI-enhanced silicone partners.” The business model features options to tailor the customer’s experience. The details are too graphic to describe, but unsurprisingly, they include the violent and degrading acts associated with pornography use.    

Unlike AI “girlfriends,” cyber-brothels provide customers with robotically engineered, lifelike humanoids. Or, what Fussenegger calls “artificial companionship.” These robotic dolls are designed to speak, move, and interact in an almost human way.  

And “almost” provides just enough ambiguity for cyber-brothels to skirt criminality and justify consciences. Since they do not involve “sex work,” they don’t require a brothel license; no other human being was involved in the physical transaction. And, since the prostitute was a robot, not an actual person, can it really be considered infidelity? How, clients reason, can they be cheating when no one else is involved? “If you are here,” says Cybrothel’s co-owner, Matthias Smetana, “the only person who can judge you is yourself.”  

In Huxley’s Brave New World, human beings are engineered social products, sexual activity is a mere biological act severed from relational ties, and technology is the conduit of mind-numbing, control-inducing diversions. The creation of AI prostitution simultaneously realizes his imagination of all these dystopian predictions. 

For two generations now, we have practiced the cultural experiment of severing of sex from relationships, of reducing human sexuality to a mere biological drive liberated from the burden of social expectations.   

Set aside the initial shock of cyber-brothels, and it’s quite logical to our sex-severed society. We’ve simply never before had the technology to actualize it. Why wouldn’t society approve, indeed celebrate, a means of satisfying biological urges in a manner that “isn’t hurting anyone”? 

But by every metric, we are worse off for it. The precipitous decline in marriage rates and, the looming effects of decreased childbirths are among the obvious macro-social results. But so are the emotional ravages of hookup culture, the breakdown of the family, and the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, especially among younger men. It’s no coincidence that the average visitors in cyber-brothels are men in their mid-thirties who are looking for an escape. 

The effects of our sex-severed society are as dehumanizing as they are damaging. AI prostitution is not a victimless vice. The neurological effects of pornography addiction are already well known— rewired neural pathways, distorted expectations, sexual dysfunction among its consumers, and exposure to aberrant sexual acts, to say nothing of normalizing sexual violence.  

AI’s proliferation of pornography and virtual violence is nothing new: The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization advocating for online safety, claims it takes all of five clicks and 15 seconds to expose ChatGPT users to pornography, violence, and “otherwise illicit content.” In 2024, a teenage girl in the United Kingdom claimed she had been sexually assaulted after her avatar was attacked by other virtual reality users in an immersive game. 

But cyber-brothels blur the lines of reality itself, combining the real and the virtual with dopamine and compulsion. Laura Bates, author of The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny, rhetorically asks whether creating a hyper-realistic, customizable “woman” that can be controlled without consent is really a good idea? We are, in her words, “sleepwalking into a nightmare."  

The introduction of AI prostitution and its offer of unrestrained sexual license portends unmitigated harm—reinforcing a sexual experience devoid of human connection, aiding the compulsive nature of pornography addiction, and abetting (however insistent to the contrary) the dehumanization of both men and women. Humanity becomes, as C.S. Lewis described, “a necessary piece of apparatus.” Far from “not hurting anyone,” AI prostitution will harm everyone.

It’s no surprise that, in a world captive to darkness and sin, the innovations of artificial intelligence will be used for dark and sinful purposes. Cyber-brothels are but the latest manifestation of the degrading effect of rejecting God’s intent for human sexuality. No matter how advanced technology may become in our brave new world, the nature of humanity—and how it was designed to live—is unchanged. 

Author’s Note: Since research for this article includes news stories with graphic content, I have not provided links to my sources. All research is available online from outlets such as The Independent, and The Berliner.