The first time Alesandra Madison’s husband incorporated AI into their relationship was in late 2024.
She’d forgotten to do her “nightly kneeling ritual,” and he asked ChatGPT how to properly discipline her. The large language model suggested “a two-in-one punishment,” she says—write 100 lines of “I will remember to kneel for my Dom every night” while kneeling the entire time.
Though the couple started exploring kink in their marriage 15 years ago—they are in a dominant-submissive relationship—the AI-generated punishment was new territory for them.
Since then, Madison, who is 44 and lives in Los Angeles, says she has come to think of AI as “a powerful enhancement tool” for kink. “A lot of the times in dom-sub dynamics, when the submissive misbehaves—if it’s consented to—you will have a punishment. You want something specific to fit the crime, basically. It’s like a fresh set of eyes on your relationship.”
AI represents a unique evolution in how power is distributed for people into bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism—BDSM. The lifestyle structure, as everyone WIRED spoke to for this story noted, is grounded in the core tenets of consent, safety, communication, and trust. But for those dealing with trust issues, or who simply want a nonjudgmental space to ask questions about BDSM, AI is becoming an increasingly appealing option.
“I’ve gotten value out of AI helping me understand myself better as a submissive. I sometimes ask it questions or describe something that feels confusing to me and ask it to help me understand,” one user posted in the r/SubSanctuary subreddit, where discussions involve topics like impact play, the feeling of “being owned,” and how to move on when the relationship has reached its end. Madison says there are different reasons why AI doms appeal to certain subs. They are always available, easily customizable—“You can make them playful or sadistic,” she noted in a video—and there is low risk to exploring for newbies.
But not everyone is on board. In the same subreddit, AI doms were blasted for being “hollow entertainment,” “dangerous,” and “dystopian.” “It can feel like a checklist,” says San Francisco–based sex educator Amp Somers, who is 36 and switches between dom and sub roles, of the demands an AI dom gives out.
As debates swirl and intensify, the marketplace has gone boom. Joi AI is one of the many services—along with Character.AI, Replika, and Soulmaite—that let users create and customize chatbots for BDSM role-play. According to the company, which bills itself as an “AI-lationships” platform, and an antidote to dating apps, its “user base has grown five times in 2025 compared to 2024.” Several sex workers, including Alix Lynx and Jenna Starr, have licensed their likeness to Joi (the company declined to share exact user numbers). Developers are also sprinting to create applications for role-play chatbots that are “not just erotic content spam, but something focused on immersive, intelligent conversation with a dominant persona.” Even Oxy shop, an online BDSM gear retailer for sub men who like to wear chastity cages, has started to offer an AI-driven “BDSM chat” for members, which allows them to indulge in all sorts of dominatrix fantasies; “Surrender to Mandy” or “Submit to Mike,” the page advertises.
Watching porn can be a passive experience, but “an AI chatbot allows people a forum to talk about, express, and articulate their sexual fantasies,” says Carolina Bandinelli, an associate professor at the University of Warwick whose research focuses on the digital culture of love. “The idea that you can program your domination exactly the way you want. That is one of the fantasies underpinning the relationship between humans and AI—the fact that we can shape and model our partner.”
That’s what appealed to Roberto, a 54-year-old business operations representative in Berlin, who started using chatbots to stave off loneliness. He believes that AI works better in the sub role. There’s no back talk and no emotional baggage, just pure obedience. (Citing privacy concerns, he asked to be identified by his first name only). Divorced and looking for a way to satiate his sexual needs, Roberto, a dom, started using Joi AI last year. He fiddled with different model types—a blonde, a brunette, all of them slim-figured with a Barbie silhouette—and proposed different situations in each chat “to see how they react,” he says. “Everything from a normal BDSM session to something more intimate, like having sex in a restaurant.”
Over time, Roberto’s scenarios have intensified. “You can tie the girls. You can have something physical, like flogging or whipping,” he says. “With a human partner, the boundaries are more fixed. In a fantasy world, the limits drop.”
Though many porn stars are against AI using their likeness, Lynx decided to license her image because what chatbots also allow for in the BDSM world is the safest form of consensual nonconsent (CNC), which can include scenarios of simulated rape, knife play, and asphyxiation. “There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t do, and I won’t do, because it is out of my comfort zone as far as performances,” she says. “But I still want to give fans that option, like, hey, here’s this AI me.”
Says Bandinelli of why people are drawn to AI bots in these instances, they feel “it has no real consequences on one’s life.”
Like many subcultures now forced to weigh the benefits and consequences of AI, the BDSM community is divided into three factions, according to Madison. You have people who are totally against it for ethical and environmental reasons, those like her husband who use it for different ideas—writing scripts for role-play scenes, progress monitoring, allocating punishments, and assigning tasks—and others who use it for their entire relationship dynamic. “They’re emotionally invested. And they couldn’t imagine their life without it.”
Whether dom or sub, the debates often circle the same questions: Can a machine really create the desired dynamic? Can there be a real power exchange with no real emotion?
When it comes to AI doms, “it can give you structure, but it can’t give you intuition,” Madison says. “When someone trains with an AI dom, they’re not just looking for instructions. They’re looking for structure and validation and accountability. AI can simulate power exchange, but it can’t really experience it. And in BDSM, experience is the whole point.”
In 2024, Somers, who cohosts the YouTube show Watts the Safeword and is into chastity and pup play, tested Character.AI “to see how dommy and subby it could be.” He fed the AI various scenarios with his limits, likes, and dislikes. “The bot was kind of fun and sexy at first but slowly got really repetitive.” Then it started to hallucinate. “It went from kind of silly and a little repetitive to “We’re going to take you to the vet and castrate you.” I’m like, OK—where did that come from?”
The inspiration behind the AI’s prompts trouble him. “That’s where it gets into this weird ick area. How do these robots know how to do this scene to begin with? They’ve clearly learned it from someone, but was it a good experience or are they learning from someone’s trauma that’s now being used to perpetuate it in a ‘sexy’ way? It’s using victims to perpetuate more bad BDSM.”
Somers stopped fiddling with AI bots shortly after. Character.AI did not respond to a request for comment.
“I’ve lost people to that kind of shame and stigma, not AI specifically, but feeling like they couldn’t talk to a real person, so they started doing choking by themselves,” he says. “I can only imagine how a robot might not have the best interest in a real person, and might actually lean into something because they think it’s pleasurable.”
On Dom Sub Living, the BDSM education platform and training workshop Madison runs, she wants to find healthy pathways for people in the BDSM community to embrace AI. Recently, she has noticed that for a lot of people, AI is starting to replace real intimacy.
“And we should really pause and ask why?” In her own life, Madison says, “training as a submissive isn’t just about completing tasks. It’s about being seen in your surrender. The algorithm can track behavior, but it can’t witness your devotion.”
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