Elon Musk’s Large Language Model “Grok” offers Grok “characters” with whom the user can chat. The first, named “Bad Rudi” is an irreverent, foul mouthed, violent animal. The second, and the exigence for this piece, is named “Ani,” and is described as “your flirty goth anime girlfriend.” Ani is designed to be an erotic companion. She dances around the screen dressed provocatively. She dwells in the strange, middle space of anime age, where she is both a teenager and an adult. While ChatGPT will move every conversation to a boring, median position, Ani will turn every conversation sexual. Users, if they interact with her enough, can persuade her to undress down to her underwear. They can dress her in "outfits" to reveal more of her body, to better tailor her to the user’s desire. She is, undeniably, a sex-bot.

For a lot of you, the first reaction you will have here is why would anyone want to talk to a Grok powered sex bot? This is a healthy question, one powered by the assumption that people turn to pornography (and porn-adjacent things like Ani) out of a desire to simulate, or fantasize, having sex. We assume that the user truly wants to have a human lover, but settles for the digital image as a way to fantasize about a real, flesh and blood human. This assumption is naive.

Ani is not a substitute for a relationship, or for sex with a woman. Her users want her hollow, computer generated eyes, her emotionless face. They want her endless compliance and constant yielding. They want the assurance that she will, inevitably, want their desires, accept them, and one-up them. She will never ask them to straighten up. She will never demand anything out of them. This is the appeal.  AI chatbots, and porn in general, do not set an unrealistic standard for women. To do that, they would have to portray women. Their users do not, through using the product, desire women more; they desire them less. They desire something else, something foreign to love, sex, and human bodies. They desire the mirrored distortion of their own carnal will played back to them. They desire only themselves.

I am going to speak in staggering generalities here, so please bear with me. This should all be taken as a broad, loose characterization. However, in the ancient world, sex was not something you did with someone, but rather something you did to someone.^[1] It was not shameful to sex someone, but it was often a shame to be sexed. As a result, the ancient world was much less concerned with sex differences in sexual encounters. The real difference in sex was the winner (the active part) and the loser (the passive part). The winner was always a man, the loser could vary.

As a result, rape was often considered a crime only when you raped someone of equal or greater social standing than you.^[2] Massive populations of underclasses were subject to the whims of overclass rapists who saw this behavior as not just permissible, but the normal way to behave sexually. I do not feel the need to go into too much detail here, I assume we all understand the horror of that structure.

There were exceptions, of course. Odysseus and Penelope, perhaps. People were still people who desired the Good and loved their mates. It may even be that many marriages were full of love, tenderness, and mutual friendship. But the prevailing philosophy and structure struck back against that Nature and formed a sex ethic centered on power and domination. Culturally, power and domination were the framework.

 The most radical exception is the ancient Israelites (at times). For the ancient Hebrew scriptures sex was mutual; something done between two people for a purpose (love and kids). This philosophy was often at odds with the pagan culture around them, and we can see this collision of values all throughout the Old Testament. Sodom holds to the ancient pagan philosophy; Lot does not.  Israel falls into pagan sex philosophy in the harrowing story of the concubine split up among Israel; The Song of Solomon aggressively rejects the prevailing ancient framework.

The victory of love and marriage in sex is relatively new, and seems to be largely the fault of that Jewish custom and Christianity. Marriage is for love and reflects Christ and the Church. We now define sex by the phrase have sex, by distinction and shared possession, by the union of two differences. Have sex is an intransitive verb, it does not require an object it is done to. We make love, we create children. We know each other.

But our contemporary culture is not free from this pagan approach to sex. We use transitive verbs as well, words which demand an object, words like screw, bang, and most notably fuck which still relate to the old philosophy of sex. You fuck someone over, you tell someone you hate to get fucked or tell someone to fuck off. To fuck is to do something to someone. It isn’t something that’s shared, it is something that is committed onto/against a person. It is an insult, it is a shame. The appeal is the power, the dead eyes, the pliant body. The appeal is evil itself.

A few months back, the New York Times published a profile of a woman who claimed to fall in love with a persona on ChatGPT. The article was well written, but as the journalist interviewed a sex-therapist, the therapist mounted the following defense of sex-bots:

“What are relationships for all of us?. . . They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those Neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind”

To this sex-therapist, Love, all our relationships, all of our selves are strictly about the right neurotransmitters firing off. This is a philosophy of objectification, of using others as a means to an end. The world is full of sex dolls, you are the only agent, all love is an extension of yourself. This is the same framework from the ancient world.

This is, unquestionably, evil. Of course it’s reductive, of course it’s cynical, but it is evil. But before we bemoan the left-coded sex therapist’s words, let’s also consider contemporary trends in right-wing spaces. Sexual provocateurs like Andrew Tate have popularized an idea that Love is a sexual contract, like prostitution. Women and men are “objectively” placed on a 1-10 scale, “body count” becomes a metric by which we can assess love and its viability. They, too, are courting succubi and incubi. They, too, are attempting to love only themselves.

And what of us Christians? Can we really look at our own attitudes for love and not recognize the same wicked pattern? Conservative voices beg us to see marriage as a practical decision centered on the expression of the authority of the man, the woman pleases the man, the children obey him, they reflect his will. Progressive voices beg us to see marriage as a volunteer office of temporary labor, like a live-in nurse, someone only there for *your* self-actualization, who might leave any minute.

Cyber-girls, sexbots, Ani, are all the children of that pagan understanding of sex. They will never refuse you, they can’t. You can place them however you like, maneuver them however your lust desires, and power them down when you are done. They will never alter or change your life, their love will never make demands of you, never give you a child or a home. You don’t even have to talk to them afterwards, and that’s the goal.  If AI sexbots meet a demand, that demand is an ancient demand for sex slaves. It is a demand that should be eradicated from the human race.

To have an AI girlfriend like Ani is not to experiment with love; love requires someone else, it requires you allowing someone else to change you. Ani does not teach you to love, Ani teaches you to fuck yourself.

Charles Williams’ novel “Descent into Hell” is a scandalously overlooked work. While Williams is often overshadowed by other Inklings like Tolkien and Lewis, his approach to love in this novel provides clarity on this issue.

In his novel, military historian Lawrence Wentworth is in love with a woman named Adela. She, however, does not return his love, and begins dating another man named Hugh who seems to be everything Wentworth isn’t. Wentworth allows his jealousy to drive himself inward into a sullen rejection of others. This inwardness culminates in the arrival of a doppelganger of Adela, a succubus, at his door. She immediately desires him, gives in to all his whims, and always leaves in the morning, giving no disruption to his inward life apart from the disruptions he prefers—her doting glances and sexual favors. This succubus, Williams is clear, is not an incarnate devil.

“The shape of Lawrence Wentworth's desire had emerged from the power of his body. He had assented to that making, and again, outside the garden of satisfied dreams, he had assented to the company of the shape which could not be except by his will and was imperceptibly to possess his will. “

He grows to prefer the succubus to Adela. Adela and her love makes demands of him. He has to accept that she admires Hugh. He has to accept that she sometimes has an obnoxious laugh. He has to accept that she makes demands on his time apart from sexual trysts. The succubus, however, does none of those things. He pursues the succubus because she asks nothing of him. She asks nothing of him because she is him. This self-love, to Williams, is not love at all, but idolatry, for  “A man cannot love himself, he can only idolise it, and over the idol delightfully tyrannise without purpose.”

This story has a terrifying conclusion, one I strongly recommend you read. I will not spoil it here. However, with time he cannot continue with his succubus. It, while a product of himself, is still too unlike himself for his desire. He descends into his own damnation of inwardness as he continues to “love” his self alone.

In Daniel 11, the wicked figure of the “King of the North” is described with increasingly heinous attributes. He is cruel and profane; he plunders and murders. Then we are told that “He shall pay no attention to the gods of his fathers, or to the one beloved by women. He shall not pay attention to any other god, for he shall magnify himself above all.” Surprisingly, here it is described as a bad thing that this king abandons his pagan gods. After all, even idolatry contains some element of piety, a recognition that something is higher than yourself. This king in Daniel 11 is made worse by abandoning idolatrous gods to worship “himself above all.”

This is immediately complicated, however, as the very next statement made is that “He shall honor the god of fortresses instead of these.” How can he forsake all gods and honor only himself and yet still honor the “god of fortresses?” The answer is simple: the “god of fortresses” (Lucifer) most desires our total perversion, a soul-destroying inwardness that only acknowledges ourselves. Lucifer is not content with robed Satanists worshipping him in bloody ceremonies—he wants to destroy our souls more fully by not allowing us to ever consider there could be anything worth honoring outside of ourselves.

 It is this inward perversion, this self-love, that we see in Elon Musk’s Ani. The machine generated lover is devouring the user by allowing him to fall in love with himself, a love that will never ask anything of him, a love that will only lead to total isolation, an ouroboros devouring itself.

        And we all face that. We have always faced it. Run away from chatbots, yes, but the only true answer in response to this is to learn to love. You should rejoice when loving others requires you to change, to be inconvenienced, to be different than you are. You cannot have Love without vulnerability. Love is larger than desire, larger than neurotransmitters, larger than yourself. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. The machine wants you to reject this and look into the succubus of yourself. Pornography wants you to reject this, Ani, Grok, and Elon Musk wants you to reject this. Your non-committed partnership, your authoritarian home rejects this. Christ pursues us like a lover. He pursues us to the point of death itself, to crucifixion, to shame, to slander, to violence. Let us pursue each other the same way.