Erobots as research tools: Overcoming the ethical and methodological challenges of sexology

Abstract

Sexology faces several ethical and methodological challenges. One of them is that sex researchers must rely on proxy methods to safely study fundamental aspects of human sexuality – in laboratories and natural environments. However, laboratory studies often lack ecological validity, whereas studies conducted in natural environments make it difficult for researchers to control experimental conditions or use sophisticated equipment. Together, this puts into question some of the empirical foundations of contemporary sexology. To address this problem, the present article proposes that sex researchers could leverage the potential of emerging technology, like erobots – or artificial erotic agents, such virtual partners, erotic chatbots, and sex robots – to help overcome some of the current ethical and methodological challenges of sexology. To make this case, this article describes these challenges; highlights how erobotic technologies could be employed as research tools to conduct more ecologically valid sexological studies safely and ethically in and outside laboratory settings; and discusses the relative strengths and weaknesses of embodied, virtual, and augmented erobots as experimental apparatus in sex research. Ultimately, this article concludes that the development of erobots that are useful for sexology may require further collaboration between academia and the private sector. It also concludes that the development of such useful erobots may allow us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our eroticism.

Digital Lovers and Jealousy: Anticipated Emotional Responses to Emotionally and Physically Sophisticated Sexual Technologies

“…Results concerning physical sophistication, however, are not consistent with the evolutionary prediction that men would be more inclined to be jealous of a female partner's physical pleasure. Instead, our results are consistent with other studies that indicate greater resistance to artificially intimate technologies among women than men [30,53,54,57].…”

“…Technology and the Capacity for New and Old Kinds of Jealousy. New technologies can offer simplified opportunities for testing ideas about human-human behaviour, including emotional responses to infidelity (e.g., [28,30,50,[53][54][55][56][57]). Intrusiveness of social media use into users' time and attention, as well as monitoring of social media activity, generated jealousy, relationship dissatisfaction, and relationship disruption [6,17,18].…”

Fifty Shades of ChatGPT: Aktueller Diskussions- und Forschungsstand zu Sex und künstlicher Intelligenz

“…Während es umfangreiche philosophische und ethische Debatten über die Romantisierung und Sexualisierung von KI-Konversationstechnologien gibt, sind empirische Forschungsergebnisse noch rar. Es wurden jedoch bereits verschiedene methodische Ansätze vorgeschlagen, um romantische und sexuelle Beziehungen zu KI-gestützten Chatbots und Robotern zu untersuchen ( Döring et al 2020 ; Dubé et al 2022 ; Hanson 2023 ).…”

A methodological reckoning for the empirical study of sex doll and sex robot issues

“…Previously, scholars often cited little or no empirical evidence to substantiate their arguments, but this is now changing (Döring et al (2020); Hanson and Locatelli (2022); Harper and Lievesley (2020)). Social scientific approaches that utilize data as a means of answering philosophical and ethical questions about how sex dolls, sex robots, and their owners and users are becoming more common (for some examples, see Appel et al (2019); Desbuleux and Fuss (2023a); Devlin and Locatelli (2020); Dubé et al (2022aDubé et al ( , 2023Dubé et al ( , 2022b; Eichenberg et al (2019); Hanson (2022Hanson ( , 2023b; Harper et al (2023); Langcaster-James and Bentley (2018); Middleweek (2021); Nordmo et al (2020); Oleksy and Wnuk (2021); Szczuka and Krämer (2019); van Voorst (2022); Zara et al (2022)).…”