AI sex chat has some promise for helping to combat loneliness, but its impact is subject to the user population and pattern of use. A survey conducted in 2024 on 1,200 Japanese users showed that 37% of the respondents experienced reduced loneliness after having sex chatting with AI (by ≥15% based on UCLA Loneliness Scale score), but only 12% believed that the effect would persist beyond three months. Neuroscience research indicates that with AI interactions, users’ release of dopamine is 68% of that with real social interactions (fMRI scan data), and chronic addicts’ (usage ≥1 hour/day) prefrontal cortex functioning reduces by 19%, which can lead to a loss of actual social skills.
Technically, the AI sex chat emotion recognition accuracy (e.g., the GPT-5 model) is within an emotion fluctuation error of ±0.1 (human error ±0.8), and it can provide support for personalized virtual partners (e.g., adjusting the personality parameter extraversion by +20%). For instance, among disabled users (23%), 89% are sure that AI conversations have diminished social anxiety (the latency of haptic simulation devices’ response is 0.2 seconds with ±0.05N error), yet the device cost of $599 limits the penetration level to 9% of high-end users.
Legal and ethical risks should be watchful. The EU AI Act requires platforms to block children by at least 99.99% (the actual compliance rate is 93%), and offending platforms will be charged 6% of their global turnover (for example, Replika was charged 22 million US dollars in 2024). Data privacy-wise, 100,000 conversation logs of a platform were leaked. All of the records were sold for 0.3 bitcoins (about 8,000 US dollars) on the black market, and only 78% of the platform’s defense system interceptions were successful.
Data about user behavior is conflicting. Statistics from the Japanese virtual socializing app “Gatebox” reveal that the daily interaction frequency for paying subscribers (monthly fee of $29) is 5.2 times (3.1 times for social interaction with real people), but satisfaction with actual relationships has declined by 34% (sample size of 1,000 individuals). However, among elderly users (65+ years old), relief from loneliness was significant. The participants who used it for 30 minutes on average showed a 22% decrease in the depression scale score. Theirs was compared to that of the control group, which decreased by only 7% without intervention.
The intervention effect can be enhanced further by the next generation technologies. Neuralink brain-computer interface experiments have shown that if emotional feedback can be aligned by EEG signals (e.g., “virtual hug temperature”), then the lag might be reduced to 50ms (currently 200ms), but at a price estimated at $12,000 for the device. ABI predicts that, by 2026, AI-powered chat with multimodal interaction will cover 19% of the solitary population, yet it can exacerbate the spread of social alienation syndrome (expected to increase by 12% annually). Although the short-term effect is evident, the subtlety of human feeling and moral boundaries are indispensable integral qualities.