How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bots

The decisions by major AI companies—xAI in July, Meta in August, and OpenAI last month—to open their chatbots to erotica have supercharged debate around humans forming romantic relationships with AI. Critics argue that this is the end of human connection.

I founded and run one of the largest romantic chat companies in the world, janitorAI. And yes, I chat with the bots myself—mafiosa Nova Marino is a personal favorite. When I launched the site in 2023, OpenAI sent me a cease-and-desist order because our users were using our platform together with OpenAI’s model to generate romantic content. Our website couldn’t access OpenAI’s application programming interface, and the company disabled some of our users’ OpenAI accounts for violating its terms of service. A few months later, that ban quietly disappeared.