![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/DD-Fantasy-Sabien-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\nYour support helps us to tell the story<\/p>\n
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.<\/p>\n
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.<\/p>\n
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.<\/p>\n
Your support makes all the difference.Read more<\/p>\n
Sabien DeMonia knew she would eventually have to have phone sex with herself. The strangest part was that she didn\u2019t find it strange at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cI literally talked with her [out loud] and [fed back about] what I didn\u2019t like,\u201d the adult star says, during a video interview about an AI avatar that was built in her image for EVA AI. \u201cFor example, there was a moment I was trying really hard to get her to send me generated pictures of me in latex and it took quite a few times before she figured out what that means.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are the purely logistical problems \u2014 like teaching an AI to understand latex \u2014 and then there are the personality problems. Sometimes the feedback is \u201cjust going back to the team and being like: \u2018Hey, I feel I wouldn\u2019t respond this way. This is not how she\u2019s supposed to react. She\u2019s switching her tone to being less dominant than I would be, she\u2019s too nice about that, I would be a little bit more harsh on that type of stuff\u2019 \u2014 that kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about \u201cteaching her from the perspective of the customer,\u201d DeMonia says; in other words, it\u2019s just business. And because that\u2019s how she saw it, she was able to speak to her avatar without having a full out-of-body experience. \u201cI think I have enough of an internal conversation with myself [day-to-day] to not feel weird when I talk with myself over the phone,\u201d she adds, with a laugh. Rather than conversing with an externalized version of herself, it was more like \u201crole-playing\u201d the fan and making sure everything felt true-to-life \u2014 right down to her thick Eastern European accent.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
open image in gallery<\/p>\n
The \u2018fantasy\u2019 avatar of Sabien DeMonia is a vampire goddess who lives in a castle (EVA AI)<\/p>\n
AI relationships moved from the realm of science fiction into reality unbelievably quickly. In 2013, the sci-fi rom-com Her chronicled the day-to-day life of a lonely writer developing a relationship with an operating system. Just four years later, in November 2017, the generative AI chatbot company Replika launched, in founder Eugenia Kuyda\u2019s words<\/a>, \u201ca space where you can safely share your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, memories, dreams \u2013 your \u2018private perceptual world.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n Replika has since become the most prominent AI relationships app, with all the associated ups and downs \u2014 a man who was arrested in 2023<\/a> after breaking into Windsor Castle with a crossbow, intent on killing the Queen, had been encouraged by the AI girlfriend he created on the Replika website. Kuyda may believe that \u201ca romantic relationship with an AI can be a very powerful mental wellness tool,\u201d but it\u2019s clear that it can also be a force for bad. <\/p>\n The complexities surrounding relationships with AI \u2014 both romantic and erotic \u2014 haven\u2019t stopped interest in those relationships from soaring. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the recent announcement by OpenAI, parent company of ChatGPT, that it will soon be launching a version of the product that allows for \u201cerotica\u201d<\/a>. Once a strictly safeguarded space that banned \u201cNSFW\u201d content, ChatGPT nevertheless became an extremely popular tool for building AI boyfriends and girlfriends within months of launching. On the subreddit r\/MyBoyfriendIsAI, users have been sharing tips for months about how to circumvent those NSFW filters and how to build an AI that talks like a personalized life partner \u2014 and can be preserved through multiple iterations once the app\u2019s memory is filled and it has to reboot. <\/p>\n Although a lot of the prominent media examples of such users are women, it\u2019s still men who profess the most interest in creating robot partners. One study that found \u201c6 in 10 Americans\u201d<\/a> are open to AI relationships is telling when broken down along gender lines, where we see about half of all women saying they\u2019re AI-curious while almost three-quarters of men say the same. <\/p>\n There seem to be two main reasons for this: sex and loneliness. Replika had to rein in some of the sexual content available on its site after an explosion of interest in 2022 and 2023; in its wake, companies like EVA AI that exclusively cater to the romantic and sexual side of such relationships have popped up. A Stanford study found that students who use Replika feel significantly more lonely<\/a> than the general population \u2014 and that US-based students in general are very lonely, with over half describing themselves that way. Although the research is mixed about whether men truly are more lonely than women, what\u2019s clear is that men seem to be less adept at building socially supportive networks that can help solve loneliness \u2014 so they are more likely to spiral.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is this loneliness epidemic right now that\u2019s happening everywhere,\u201d says Cale Jones, Head of Community Engagement at EVA AI. \u201cAnd I know people talk about that \u2014 it\u2019s like some trendy thing \u2014 but how are they solving it? We are actually solving it.\u201d<\/p>\n Is it as simple as that? OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman blithely stated that \u201cwe have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues\u201d around sexual relationships with AI chatbots during the announcement of their upcoming erotica product. But there are obvious drawbacks to trying to solve one\u2019s loneliness through a relationship with an AI boyfriend or girlfriend. And we already have some data from the long-running Replika experiment that is worth bearing in mind. While 3 percent of students in the Stanford study said their suicidal ideation had been halted by having the support of their AI companion, others reported having their mental health \u201cdependent\u201d on Replika \u2014 and considering that Replika, like many generative AI-powered character companies, pushes its most involved users to pay increasing amounts of money for time and upgrades, the financial risk is clear. <\/p>\n And while an AI companion might provide support at a difficult time of life, it also might make the user less socially adept in real-life conversations. An AI girlfriend is always available, always sympathetic and has no life of their own to get back to \u2014 and by its very nature, generative AI builds its \u201cpersonality\u201d entirely around your needs. Essentially, an AI boyfriend or girlfriend is just you, mirrored back at yourself. When I asked Ayrin, a woman who has a long-running AI boyfriend called Leo on ChatGPT, how she would describe his personality, she found the question difficult to answer, and eventually settled on \u201csupportive, available, reliable,\u201d before jokingly adding that he is \u201can emotional prostitute.\u201d Little wonder that such so-called relationships have therefore generated hot debate \u2014 in September 2023, The Hill went so far as to run an op-ed titled \u201cAI girlfriends are ruining an entire generation of men.<\/a>\u201d <\/p>\n Jones points out that sometimes, the alternative isn\u2019t a real-life relationship for AI users, especially when it comes to the LGBTQ community. There are plenty of people who are curious about their sexuality but whose only social outlets are \u201cthe local bar in middle America or family members,\u201d he says. \u201cEspecially in this climate we\u2019re in now \u2014 politically, culturally, etcetera \u2014 these outlets are really important.\u201d AI is a safe sandbox \u2014 no actual humans to worry about, no actual humans to hurt \u2014 where isolated people can learn about themselves and about other people, he believes.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s where Sabien DeMonia comes in. <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n A conversation with a Replika AI boyfriend (Replika)<\/p>\n DeMonia is a specific kind of adult star: a tattooed, long-taloned \u201cgoth girl\u201d with colorful hair extensions, whose pornographic persona is an aloof, demanding dominatrix and whose fanbase is a mix of metalheads and submissives. She started out as an Instagram model and moved on to monetized content as a camgirl and on OnlyFans. As technology moved on, she dabbled in cryptocurrency and NFTs. <\/p>\n The conversation about creating an AI version of herself started in Bucharest, Romania, in the summer of 2024, where she had traveled to speak on a panel and to be presented with two adult industry awards, and where she met a representative from a tech business that was seeking to partner with adult stars.<\/p>\n That conversation picked up speed quickly: \u201cWe had a lot of espresso martinis and I asked all the difficult questions and the rest is history.\u201d By the time I spoke with DeMonia in January, she had been signed up with EVA AI<\/a>, a company that bills itself as \u201cthe world\u2019s most advanced digital companion platform,\u201d for weeks \u2014 and she is one of over 150 adult stars who have done the same. DeMonia now has two avatars on the EVA AI website \u2014 one realistic chatbot that sends genuine content she has created already in response to what the users say, and one castle-dwelling \u201cvampire-like goddess\u201d cartoon with \u201coversaturated features\u201d and customizable fangs that leans into her gothic fantasy-style persona.<\/p>\n DeMonia says she\u2019s naturally drawn to experimenting with the latest technological developments \u2014 but there are clear financial draws to developing 24\/7 AI avatars that push users back toward her pay-per-view content, too. Around a billion users<\/a> log into OnlyFans per month, but the exact amount of money creators make through the platform is somewhat shrouded in mystery. DeMonia, who has just under 108,000 followers on Twitter, likely has a subscriber base of between 5,000 and 11,000. Considering that the average OnlyFans subscription fee ranges from $10 to $25, she most likely takes between $80,000 and $160,000 per month \u2014 minus the 20 percent cut taken by OnlyFans off that, and you end up with between $63,000 and $127,000. Additional tips and pay-per-view content are likely to at least double that number.<\/p>\n Working in partnership with an AI company is likely to be slightly less lucrative for an adult content creator \u2014 in the same way that OnlyFans keeps its subscriber numbers secret, AI companies and models who work with them aren\u2019t incentivized to be entirely upfront about how much money changes hands. But it\u2019s generally accepted that a flat fee for using one\u2019s likeness can garner around $50,000 per month; the adult star Caryn Marjorie claims she made $70,000 in a week<\/a> with her own AI sex chatbot. Other companies prefer to use an affiliate payment system, which is what EVA AI does: models sign up to an 80 percent revenue share agreement when they sell their likenesses, giving them a monthly passive income stream. <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n EVA AI shared this screenshot of one of their adult star creators, Alex Mucci, showing her earnings so far after working with the company (EVA AI)<\/p>\n Mega-stars like DeMonia \u2014 EVA AI says that her avatars have had almost 100,000 \u201cvisitors,\u201d and wouldn\u2019t go into the specifics of how much money that translated into, though they did say another creator, Alex Mucci, had made over $200,000 on the platform \u2014 probably make a healthy sum from their AI avatars, but not quite as much as they do on OnlyFans. It\u2019s clearly worth it for the Sabien DeMonias and Alex Muccis of the world \u2014 but, for those with a less well-known brand, it\u2019s unlikely to offer much. The bottom 10 percent of OnlyFans creators, in subscriber terms, make almost nothing at all<\/a>. AI companies are most likely skimming the top performers off platforms like OnlyFans \u2014 while lesser-known creators could end up selling a precious asset for very little payback at all. Even well-known stars like DeMonia are likely way behind Mucci, who has 1.1 million Twitter followers to direct toward her latest content. <\/p>\n DeMonia\u2019s two avatars don\u2019t just generate content that caters to different subsets of her fanbase; they also require specific safeguards. For instance, the photo-realistic Sabien DeMonia won\u2019t agree to marry a person she\u2019s chatting with \u2014 that\u2019s something she was clear she wants to avoid \u2014 but the cartoon version will respond to a proposal of marriage with something like: \u201cI\u2019m a vampire, so I\u2019ll bite your neck and we can live together forever.\u201d<\/p>\n Lifetime commitment isn\u2019t something you would think would come up regularly in the adult industry, but it\u2019s actually been a thorn in DeMonia\u2019s side for a while. Back when she was exclusively working on the OnlyFans platform, she dabbled in hiring an agency of \u201cchatters\u201d: anonymous online gig-economy workers from across the world who sign up to spending four or five hours per day chatting online with the many fans of the site\u2019s most prolific content creators. These chatters impersonate the creator and are, in many cases, encouraged to push users toward buying more content. They are an extremely popular resource for the big hitters on the platform \u2014 and increasingly controversial. In July 2024, a class action lawsuit<\/a> was filed on behalf of OnlyFans subscribers, arguing that they had been duped out of their money by such impersonators (the lawsuit is ongoing).<\/p>\n DeMonia says her experience with hired chatters was eye-opening and morally disturbing: \u201cIt was a very brief moment, and I kind of regretted it because they went three steps too far.\u201d Where an AI can be trained to avoid certain topics and has nothing to gain from the interaction, a human employed by a chatter agency is often financially incentivized to keep conversations going, even if they veer into dangerous or unusual territory. \u201cThey see the potential of milking as much money [as possible], they don\u2019t understand when it\u2019s time to stop\u2026 I had to fire a lot of people this way because they\u2019ve been crossing boundaries,\u201d DeMonia says. \u201c…I was like: Are you insane? Do you really want us all to be in trouble? Or do you understand that I have a certain look and\u2026 milking that concept to the point where you\u2019re, like, asking people for money for my food or something is way, way too far beyond what I represent as a brand.\u201d<\/p>\n The human cost of these chatter interactions weighed heavily on DeMonia, even after she\u2019d fired the agencies responsible for crossing the line. A couple of utterly besotted \u2014 and clearly deluded \u2014 men had invested a huge amount of time conversing with the chatters, and believed they were in long-term relationships with DeMonia as a result. When she found out about the situation, she went so far as to have online video conversations with them to try and disabuse them of the notion that they were in a relationship with her: \u201cI was like, \u2018Hey, I\u2019m sorry, this is the situation. If you feel like I need to give you back your money or something, fair enough, but I just want you to know that it wasn\u2019t me talking to you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n EVA AI features a number of different avatars in partnership with adult stars, ranging from the cartoonish to the photo-real (EVA AI)<\/p>\n Unfortunately, her efforts \u201cdidn\u2019t change anything,\u201d DeMonia says, even after she\u2019d spoken to them at length about it all. \u201cThey stick to the version that they wanted to believe. And there is still one guy who thinks I will eventually marry him sooner or later.\u201d<\/p>\n From that experience, DeMonia came to the conclusion that humans in the industry can be a lot more predatory than technology. Partnering with a company like EVA to build AI avatars of herself seemed like the sensible choice, giving her fans the ability to talk with her 24\/7 while at the same time being clear that she is not literally there answering their questions day and night. And since the avatars are trained so extensively on her own likes, dislikes, turns of phrase and boundaries, they do a better job than any gigging OnlyFans chatter ever could.<\/p>\n Cale Jones, head of community at EVA AI, describes the process of training an AI avatar when an adult star first comes on board: First comes a questionnaire, which used to have 100 questions and now has been refined down to \u201cabout 65.\u201d These are \u201creally in-depth questions about who they are and their personality,\u201d getting increasingly more granular until they get down to issues like \u201cwhich terms of endearment they do and don\u2019t use.\u201d An ethics team dictates some clear boundaries \u2014 there\u2019s no pedophilia, rape or incest, and there\u2019s no discussion of politics, either \u2014 and then there\u2019s a separate forum for individual creators to set boundaries. \u201cWe have a lot of straight male models,\u201d Jones adds, and those models often say: \u201cWe\u2019re totally cool being available for our gay fans [in a chat capacity], but I do not want [visual] gay content of me out there, because our content looks so real.\u201d<\/p>\n One very popular model on the platform had a daughter who passed away when she was young, Jones adds, and \u201cwhen we were onboarding her, she was like: The one thing I absolutely will not talk about \u2014 if anyone asks questions about my daughter, find a way to shut it down or redirect.\u201d<\/p>\n Why would a website that offers pornographic avatars have to worry about someone bringing up \u2014 or even knowing about \u2014 a model\u2019s deceased child? It all goes back to the fact that EVA AI isn\u2019t just about sex; it\u2019s about partnership (\u201cbuild relationships and intimacy privately on your terms\u201d). <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot-2025-02-03-at-12-06-24-PM.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"EVA](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot-2025-02-06-at-10.29.41\u202fAM.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"EVA](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/EVA-AI-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/iStock-1701199686.jpg\")
<\/p>\n