Sabien DeMonia knew she would eventually have to have phone sex with herself. The strangest part was that she didn’t find it strange at all.
“I literally talked with her [out loud] and [fed back about] what I didn’t like,” the adult star says, during a video interview about an AI avatar that was built in her image for EVA AI. “For 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.”
There are the purely logistical problems — like teaching an AI to understand latex — and then there are the personality problems. Sometimes the feedback is “just going back to the team and being like: ‘Hey, I feel I wouldn’t respond this way. This is not how she’s supposed to react. She’s switching her tone to being less dominant than I would be, she’s too nice about that, I would be a little bit more harsh on that type of stuff’ — that kind of thing.”
It’s about “teaching her from the perspective of the customer,” DeMonia says; in other words, it’s just business. And because that’s how she saw it, she was able to speak to her avatar without having a full out-of-body experience. “I 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,” she adds, with a laugh. Rather than conversing with an externalized version of herself, it was more like “role-playing” the fan and making sure everything felt true-to-life — right down to her thick Eastern European accent.
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’s words, “a space where you can safely share your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, memories, dreams – your ‘private perceptual world.’”
Replika has since become the most prominent AI relationships app, with all the associated ups and downs — a man who was arrested in 2023 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 “a romantic relationship with an AI can be a very powerful mental wellness tool,” but it’s clear that it can also be a force for bad.
Much has been said about the users of such apps: although a quick scroll through the popular subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI will reveal that there are plenty of female users in this space, it’s still men who dominate. One recent study that found “6 in 10 Americans” are open to AI relationships is telling when broken down along gender lines, where we see about half of all women saying they’re AI-curious while almost three-quarters of men say the same.
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 than the general population — 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’s clear is that men seem to be less adept at building socially supportive networks that can help solve loneliness — so they are more likely to spiral.
“There is this loneliness epidemic right now that’s happening everywhere,” says Cale Jones, Head of Community Engagement at EVA AI. “And I know people talk about that — it’s like some trendy thing — but how are they solving it? We are actually solving it.”
Is it as simple as that? There are obvious drawbacks to trying to solve one’s loneliness through a relationship with an AI boyfriend or girlfriend. 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 “dependent” on Replika — 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.
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 — and by its very nature, generative AI builds its “personality” 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 “supportive, available, reliable,” before jokingly adding that he is “an emotional prostitute.” Little wonder that such so-called relationships have therefore generated hot debate — in September 2023, The Hill went so far as to run an op-ed titled “AI girlfriends are ruining an entire generation of men.”
Jones points out that sometimes, the alternative isn’t 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 “the local bar in middle America or family members,” he says. “Especially in this climate we’re in now — politically, culturally, etcetera — these outlets are really important.” AI is a safe sandbox — no actual humans to worry about, no actual humans to hurt — where isolated people can learn about themselves and about other people, he believes.
And that’s where Sabien DeMonia comes in.
DeMonia is a specific kind of adult star: a tattooed, long-taloned “goth girl” 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.
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.
That conversation picked up speed quickly: “We had a lot of espresso martinis and I asked all the difficult questions and the rest is history.” By the time I spoke with DeMonia in January, she had been signed up with EVA AI, a company that bills itself as “the world’s most advanced digital companion platform,” for weeks — and she is one of over 150 adult stars who have done the same. DeMonia now has two avatars on the EVA AI website — one realistic chatbot that sends genuine content she has created already in response to what the users say, and one castle-dwelling “vampire-like goddess” cartoon with “oversaturated features” and customizable fangs that leans into her gothic fantasy-style persona.
DeMonia says she’s naturally drawn to experimenting with the latest technological developments — 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 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 — 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.
Working in partnership with an AI company is likely to be slightly less lucrative for an adult content creator — in the same way that OnlyFans keeps its subscriber numbers secret, AI companies and models who work with them aren’t incentivized to be entirely upfront about how much money changes hands. But it’s generally accepted that a flat fee for using one’s likeness can garner around $50,000 per month; the adult star Caryn Marjorie claims she made $70,000 in a week 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.
Mega-stars like DeMonia — EVA AI says that her avatars have had almost 100,000 “visitors,” and wouldn’t 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 — probably make a healthy sum from their AI avatars, but not quite as much as they do on OnlyFans. It’s clearly worth it for the Sabien DeMonias and Alex Muccis of the world — but, for those with a less well-known brand, it’s unlikely to offer much. The bottom 10 percent of OnlyFans creators, in subscriber terms, make almost nothing at all. AI companies are most likely skimming the top performers off platforms like OnlyFans — 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.
DeMonia’s two avatars don’t just generate content that caters to different subsets of her fanbase; they also require specific safeguards. For instance, the photo-realistic Sabien DeMonia won’t agree to marry a person she’s chatting with — that’s something she was clear she wants to avoid — but the cartoon version will respond to a proposal of marriage with something like: “I’m a vampire, so I’ll bite your neck and we can live together forever.”
Lifetime commitment isn’t something you would think would come up regularly in the adult industry, but it’s actually been a thorn in DeMonia’s side for a while. Back when she was exclusively working on the OnlyFans platform, she dabbled in hiring an agency of “chatters”: 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’s 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 — and increasingly controversial. In July 2024, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of OnlyFans subscribers, arguing that they had been duped out of their money by such impersonators (the lawsuit is ongoing).
DeMonia says her experience with hired chatters was eye-opening and morally disturbing: “It was a very brief moment, and I kind of regretted it because they went three steps too far.” 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. “They see the potential of milking as much money [as possible], they don’t understand when it’s time to stop… I had to fire a lot of people this way because they’ve been crossing boundaries,” DeMonia says. “…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… milking that concept to the point where you’re, like, asking people for money for my food or something is way, way too far beyond what I represent as a brand.”
The human cost of these chatter interactions weighed heavily on DeMonia, even after she’d fired the agencies responsible for crossing the line. A couple of utterly besotted — and clearly deluded — 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: “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m 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’t me talking to you.’”
Unfortunately, her efforts “didn’t change anything,” DeMonia says, even after she’d spoken to them at length about it all. “They 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.”
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.
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 “about 65.” These are “really in-depth questions about who they are and their personality,” getting increasingly more granular until they get down to issues like “which terms of endearment they do and don’t use.” An ethics team dictates some clear boundaries — there’s no pedophilia, rape or incest, and there’s no discussion of politics, either — and then there’s a separate forum for individual creators to set boundaries. “We have a lot of straight male models,” Jones adds, and those models often say: “We’re 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.”
One very popular model on the platform had a daughter who passed away when she was young, Jones adds, and “when we were onboarding her, she was like: The one thing I absolutely will not talk about — if anyone asks questions about my daughter, find a way to shut it down or redirect.”
Why would a website that offers pornographic avatars have to worry about someone bringing up — or even knowing about — a model’s deceased child? It all goes back to the fact that EVA AI isn’t just about sex; it’s about partnership (“build relationships and intimacy privately on your terms”).
The company commissioned its own research into whether or not society is open to the idea of full-blown AI relationships or AI marriages — the overwhelming answer is yes, according to their latest survey, in which 80 percent of respondents said they would be open to marrying an AI if legal frameworks allowed it and 77 percent believe AIs can fully replace human companionship. Studies from other sources tend to be a lot less positive, with one recent YouGov survey finding that 25 percent of young adults believe AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships — and it’s worth noting the EVA AI only surveyed men, with a small sample of 2,000. Their extremely high numbers of AI acceptance suggest that their methodology may have been biased toward people who were already AI-curious.
Sabien DeMonia was unsurprised by those results, however.
“All the stuff we do [as adult content creators] is support and relationship type of things,” she says. “That’s why the most popular girls on OnlyFans aren’t the ones who are the most pretty or sexual — they’re actually the ones that are most ‘nextdoor.’” Imagining companionship with an adult star is a huge part of the fantasy, she adds. And though she has a very particular aesthetic, she still sees herself as belonging to that more approachable category (“Like you can see, I don’t wear much make-up… I actually prefer not to,” she says, and it’s true: she turns up to our call clearly bare-faced and in comfortable clothing, dressed for a casual chat rather than a performance.) When she first started out, the industry revolved around still photos, which are easily Photoshopped, she adds; once she moved to video, she had to show some flaws because she couldn’t create video content that was filtered in the way photos can be. Video meant that her fans got to know her way of talking and snippets of her personality — then, as she became more well-known in the industry, she started taking part in podcasts, so fans got to know her views and opinions. These days, the person she is behind the camera and the person she is in everyday life are the closest they’ve ever been.
The more realistic-style AI avatar of her, however, isn’t entirely true-to-life — she’s a little less down-to-business, a little more patient, “a very cute, chatty version of me. Like not very eastern European, I would say. I think it is the US company touch…making me a little bit more approachable.” DeMonia likes her — she thinks it’s the version of herself she might be if she had more time, if she was less stressed.
And she is stressed a lot these days. Juggling so many aspects of a business and maintaining a strict brand can take its toll. “My sex life became way more boring now it’s monetized,” she says. “…I have to be very careful. I have to be very thoughtful of the people I work with. So I can’t really just let it go and swipe on Tinder.” She took some time off work recently and decided to attend some of the fetish parties she used to go to but hadn’t been able to visit for a while, “and I was like: Oh my God, I’m boring now.”
“I also have to live up to certain expectations now,” she adds. “So I’m kind of like: ‘Oh, tomorrow I have work. So today I will not go to the fetish party. I will go and sit and enjoy watching a movie because it’s so nice and different to what I have to do at work.’” She’s had to accept the counterintuitive truth that doing so much work in the adult industry has made her “more vanilla”.
Although a lot of what happens on EVA AI’s platform is decidedly spicy — and absolutely would violate the sexual content guardrails put in place by a more general large language model like ChatGPT — Cale Jones describes it in fairly vanilla terms himself: to him, it’s a “safe place to talk about sex and relationships.” As a gay man, Jones adds, “it’s personal. It’s really personal to me, what we’re doing… For the last six years I’ve been in the sex space and seeing the type of impact we can have on people’s lives is really incredible, from those who are in middle America to the Middle East.”
For Jones, it’s a calling. For DeMonia, it’s a business, and the customer base has to be managed that way. “If you’re a very lonely person who has attachment issues, well, it doesn’t matter — you will eventually meet some sort of relationship with something that you shouldn’t,” she says. “We know people get married to sex dolls and stuff. It’s part of the social changes right now that you can’t really avoid because people feel lonely and that’s just basically something for a therapist to take care of.”
Her responsibility, as she sees it, is to her level-headed fans. For instance, it should be clear to most people that her vampire avatar isn’t a real vampire who is going to bite them and live forever in a castle as their wife.
“If you believe that, then I’m sorry,” she says, with the straight-up bluntness for which she is known. “There is nothing we can do over here.”
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