Everywhere, the interest around the subject seems to be increasing. Since April, search traffic on YouTube for “Ai Porn” has been the highest in Sweden, Australia and Canada, according to Google Trends. More recently, the decision of the Supreme Court maintaining Texas’s Porn Act -which is similar to laws in at least 20 other states, and requires adult websites to verify that their users are at least 18 -have raised whether some people can make AI -Porn at home, which completely bypass these platforms. The increasing ability to create hyperreal sexual images, specifically provided to the desires of a person, can now produce porn that is just as orgasmic as any human generated video flying around on the aggregator sites. Companion programs such as Nomi and replica are also used as alternatives to build intimate relationships and have sex with AI bots.

But “Ai porn, in itself, is not necessarily a problem,” said Paula Hall, a psychotherapist at the Laurel Center in London, the leading specialist provider of CSBD treatment in the UK, “but rather the way it is used.”

As people get more used to getting what they want from realistic AI versions of porn, in addition to the buffet of erotic media that already exists over the Internet, the human connection for some can no longer be enough, says Monifa Ellis-Addie, a therapist at Banyan Therapy Group, in Los Angeles, a faith-based advocate. In the most extreme cases, professionals in mental health say that an increased dependence will enable people to fully release. “The consequences are going to be quite harmful,” says Ellis-Addie. For some people, sex addiction is built on a kind of ‘faux intimacy’, she continues. “Ai is just going to make it easier. It will feel like you are dealing with a real person, and with a real person coming up things like real feelings. It will make people in real life more far away. ‘

Kyle’s epiphany that it was time to finally temper his addiction during a work trip to New York in February. He was alone in a hotel, away from his girlfriend, and he says, “I just kept doing and doing it, but I didn’t feel better.” He has since acted to limit his need for masturbating, including at the Reddit support group Nofap, where members share similar battle.

Professionals believe it can make it harder to start new IRL relationships.

Young people are currently facing a mental health crisis. Last year, the US Surgeon General asked for a warning label on all social media platforms. A great consequence was a ‘loneliness epidemic’, according to a 2024 Harvard study, suggesting that people who feel more alone suffer from higher depression and anxiety.

“Social media has distorted our views on so many things – image image, social class, politics. It is hurt in many ways,” says Daniel Glazer, a psychotherapist at Fifth Ave Psychiatry in New York, who has loneliness, isolation, depression, shame and issues related to sexual action as concern. What happens to AI -Porn “can be another extension of it,” he adds.

But AI also has the potential for right “positive crossing” for people struggling with relationships, platonic and romantic. “I understand sex addiction as a way to avoid life, a way to avoid relationships. Ai can therefore be some kind of bridge to someone who is afraid of a relationship,” Glazer says. “Here is a relationship that is not narrow and that you will not be criticized.” They will just have to get their confidence on it.

More recently, Kyle has fully curbed his intake of adult content. Although AI is still in his early days, he sees it as “one of the worst technological developments we now show up” because of its too much accessibility. “It’s worse than the right thing.”