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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 5% 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."
+1 Funny and Sad?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday November 17 2016, @03:33PM
If 5% of your interactions are "clearly sexually explicit," does that mean actual sexualized interactions, or does that include insults, swearing, nasty stupid things, etc. just said to the "virtual assistant"?
I have no doubt that there are SOME people out there getting off while talking to Siri, just as there are some people out there who find just about anything stimulating.
But I also wonder about such stories and stats a bit, because I've definitely been around people (mostly men) who have enjoyed saying ridiculous things to Siri just to see what would happen, including sexual banter, sexual insults, etc. Yes, probably "inquiries regarding 'her' sex life," too. In all such cases, it seemed clear to me that the people in question were amused by the prospect of seeing what Siri would do or say in response to a bizarre query, rather than actually "talking dirty" to it. I'd hardly call such cases "mechanophilia" -- in fact, it's often the exact opposite. Most of these interactions I've seen over the years (particularly when Siri was relatively new) were from people who clearly thought Siri was stupid, pointless, and were just "messing" with it.
Again, this is just anecdotal, but so is one random Reddit post. The rest of the summary could be mostly talking about stupid people trying out dumb queries for amusement, rather than serious sexual banter.