In September 2026, legal Nevada sex worker Alice Little told 8 News Now that she believes hers is “one of the only professions that’s completely safe from AI,” adding that there is “no risk of a robot coming and replacing what I do.” It is a bold prediction at a time when workers in seemingly every profession are wondering how much of their job artificial intelligence may eventually perform. But Little’s position is more thoughtful than the quote alone might suggest. Earlier this year, she wrote at length about AI companionship, arguing that a real relationship requires two people who can set boundaries, disagree, say no and decide for themselves whether they want to participate. A chatbot has no independent needs, monetary, sexual or otherwise. A sex worker does. So the more interesting question is this: What exactly would a machine have to replace before we could say it had replaced a sex worker?
What Sex Workers Thought Robots Could Never Do
I have been asking some version of that question for more than a decade. In 2014, I wrote a blog for a legal brothel titled “Will Robots Replace Prostitutes?” and asked several licensed sex workers what they believed a robot could never provide. Violet described a sex robot as an “advanced masturbation aid” and acknowledged that complete control over the experience might appeal to some customers. But she doubted a robot could carry on a worthwhile conversation or develop genuine chemistry with a client. Erin focused on empathy and emotional fulfillment. Montana talked about intuition and the chemistry that develops between two people. At the time, these seemed like pretty reasonable lines to draw. Conversation, empathy, emotional responsiveness and the ability to understand a customer all looked like things a machine would have a hard time convincingly reproducing.
By the time CES arrived in Las Vegas in 2016, virtual reality had become the next potential “threat” to human sex work. I blogged about VR and teledildonics and asked what increasingly immersive virtual sex might mean for Nevada’s brothels over the following five to ten years. Courtesan Marly argued that customers were looking for comfort, compassion and real intimacy. Red Diamonds believed a virtual experience could not teach a nervous or inexperienced customer what an actual woman could. Amber Lynn acknowledged some obvious advantages to virtual sex, including convenience, but wondered whether removing the effort and unpredictability from a sexual encounter would also remove some of its value. Ten years later, VR pornography certainly exists and sexual technology has improved, but the disruption to Nevada brothels that we were contemplating never arrived. I cannot tell you that VR had no economic effect on sex work because there is no reliable data showing that. I can very confidently say Nevada did not spend the last decade watching customers abandon brothels for headsets.
In 2017, when I worked for the BunnyRanch, Dennis Hof announced that the Ranch was exploring sex robots, with a press release suggesting that “Westworld-style” sexbots might be available before 2020. Alice Little was actually not opposed to the idea. She suggested that a sexbot might help nervous virgins become more comfortable before having sex with a woman and joked about the possibilities of a threesome with a robot. By 2018, the media had moved on to “robot brothels.” I blogged about KinkySdollS, a company planning to expand into the United States. Despite the futuristic headlines, the business involved renting realistic sex dolls, not autonomous robots. Two years later, an operation called the Las Vegas Sex Dolls Experience opened in Clark County and attracted the attention of residents, regulators and the media. I had some involvement in that story. At the time I was running my own communications business, and after seeing a Vital Vegas post about the operation, I verified that it was real and circulated a media pitch built around licensed sex worker Roxanne Price’s reaction. The Review-Journal subsequently investigated the business and interviewed Price. Clark County began scrutinizing the operation and its licensing, while the business changed the language on its website to emphasize that customers were trying dolls before purchasing them. For a little while, it looked like the sex doll brothel might actually become something.
Then, as had happened before, the future moved on. There was no wave of Westworld sexbots working alongside Nevada courtesans. Virtual reality did not empty the brothels. Sex doll rental businesses did not reinvent prostitution. If we stopped the story there, Nevada’s sex workers would look pretty prescient.
What AI Can Already Do
The physical sex robot everyone was watching never really showed up. Meanwhile, AI learned how to talk. It can remember information about us, adapt to our preferences, play characters, flirt, reassure, teach, entertain and even respond to emotional cues. AI companions can provide seemingly endless attention and increasingly convincing simulations of affection and interest. Several of the abilities that sex workers identified a decade ago as distinctly human are now things artificial intelligence does surprisingly well. We spent years waiting for the sex doll to start talking. We should probably have been paying more attention to the chatbot.
None of this tells us that AI is about to replace Nevada sex workers, and twelve years of failed technological predictions should make anyone cautious about saying so. But the technology has changed considerably. Some of the abilities we once assumed were uniquely human aren’t so easy to put in that category anymore. Before deciding what AI cannot replace, we should probably be honest about what it can already do.
You don’t have to look very hard to see how much things have changed. Replika lets users choose whether their AI companion is a friend, mentor, girlfriend or boyfriend, and builds on information from earlier conversations. Nomi openly markets AI girlfriends and boyfriends that remember preferences and moods, flirt, roleplay and even initiate messages. Kindroid does much the same with long-term memory, custom backstories, voice calls and video. Those are the companies describing their own products, so I’m not going to treat claims about “authentic” relationships or “human-level” memory as scientific findings. Still, compared with the motionless silicone dolls we were arguing about a decade ago, the difference is pretty obvious.
And an emotional experience with AI can still be real for the person having it. Researchers have found that interacting with an AI companion can temporarily reduce feelings of loneliness. In one experiment, the immediate effect was comparable to interacting with another person. The researchers did not find a lasting reduction in baseline loneliness, which is an important limitation. Still, if someone talks to an AI companion and comes away feeling less lonely, the relief is real. The study was about loneliness, but the same basic point can apply more broadly. Someone can feel comfort, amusement, sexual arousal or simply feel understood while interacting with AI. The software does not have to feel anything for the person using it to feel something.
The human side is more complicated than saying a sex worker is simply being paid to fake the same things. Christina Parreira spent years studying intimacy inside Nevada brothels, interviewing 50 sex workers at five brothels and working inside two of them as a participant observer. The women she interviewed talked about conversation, attention, emotional support, friendship, chemistry and companionship as real parts of the job. Sometimes the connection with a customer was genuine. Sometimes the emotional side was clearly part of the performance. And sometimes it was probably a little of both. Parreira also looked at the difference between a girlfriend experience, which puts more emphasis on intimacy and companionship, and a pornstar experience, which is built more around an overtly sexual fantasy. Even there, the line between emotional and physical was not as clean as you might expect. Workers offering both types of experiences made choices about how much emotional and bodily labor they brought to the encounter. Payment may explain why the encounter started, but it does not necessarily tell you what either person is feeling once they are together.
What Does Another Person Add?
For the sake of argument, let’s give AI every advantage. Assume it remembers every conversation, learns exactly what a customer likes, recognizes moods, tells jokes, flirts convincingly and adjusts its personality over time. Let’s also assume the physical technology eventually catches up and the sexual experience becomes remarkably convincing too. At that point, I think the question gets pretty basic: Is this something happening to me, or is it something happening between us? I can be aroused by AI. I can feel wanted by it. I can become attached to it. All of that can be very real for me. But where is the we? Current AI has not demonstrated that it wants me, enjoys being with me or experiences anything at all. It can become extremely good at convincing me that it does. There is still only one person we know is actually having the experience.
That brings me back to Violet’s “advanced masturbation aid” comment from 2014. If the machine is doing all of this for me, but there is nobody else actually having the experience with me, then I think she had it right. We are still talking about a masturbation tool, just an extraordinarily sophisticated one. I don’t use masturbation here as an insult. The experience could be fantastic. Someone could become emotionally attached to an AI, derive real comfort from it and have an incredibly satisfying sexual experience with it. But all of that is still happening on the “I” side of the equation. Until there is another participant actually experiencing the encounter, I don’t see how it becomes a we.
Does the Customer Care?
But this argument only works if the customer cares. If an AI can make a customer feel desired, they may not care whether it actually desires them. In fact, some of the things that come with another human being may be exactly what a customer would rather avoid. A real person can be tired, distracted, uninterested or simply not attracted to them. A sex worker has her own preferences, boundaries and needs. She can tell them no. An AI can be built around the user instead. It can provide attention, acceptance, sexual satisfaction and companionship without asking the customer to accommodate someone else’s wants. For some people, that may be the selling point. Maybe the independence of another person is part of what gives intimacy its value. Or maybe it is just friction that technology can remove.
What Is the Value of Being Chosen?
This is where legal prostitution makes the question especially interesting. The customer is paying, but he is still dealing with another person who has her own interests, preferences and boundaries. A sex worker can decline him, refuse a particular service or simply feel no chemistry. She can also genuinely like him, laugh because he actually said something funny, enjoy spending time with him or look forward to seeing him again. None of that is guaranteed by the money. A paid encounter, like any other human encounter, still contains a “we.” In fact, the other person’s independence is what makes any genuine response from her possible in the first place. If she could not have said no, what exactly does yes mean?
After twelve years of casually blogging about sex robots, virtual reality and other technologies that were supposed to change prostitution, I am reluctant to make another confident prediction about what happens next. So far, I have seen no reason to believe Nevada customers are preparing to abandon human sex workers for machines, and plenty of reason to be skeptical of anyone who claims to know exactly how this ends. Alice Little may ultimately be completely right. What keeps pulling me back is her phrase “what I do.” AI can already imitate some of the things we once assumed belonged only to human intimacy. What it has not shown is that there is another participant in there having an experience of her own. That may turn out to be a huge distinction. It may turn out to be one many people barely care about. I don’t think anyone knows yet.
I don’t know where most people will draw that line, and I’m not sure I even know where I would draw it every time. AI may eventually get incredibly good at giving us exactly what we want. If that happens, I keep coming back to two questions: Was another person part of what we wanted? And what does it say about us if the answer is “no”?
Image Attributions
Human-robot.jpg — Mohamed Hassan. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal.
THE VIEW (Virtual Reality).jpg — Wade Sisler / NASA. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain as a work of the U.S. federal government/NASA.
Halodi Robotics’ Perception Engineer With a Humanoid Collaborative Robot.jpg — Nicholas-halodi. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Ameca Generation 1.jpg — Willy Jackson. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Dreamstime image ID 241558717 © Sakkmesterke | Dreamstime.com
Photo of Alice Little used with Little’s permission.