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Today I want to talk about the teaching sex bot. If you’ve seen this news, you know exactly what I’m talking about and if you haven’t, well, you are probably appropriately horrified already but please, allow me to increase your horror substantially.
Back in June, it was announced that the world’s first AI-powered humanoid robot would start tutoring students in a public school classroom in New York state. My immediate kneejerk reaction to the photos that accompanied these articles was “that’s a sexbot.” Then I thought, hey, that’s not fair. I don’t see an attractive woman and assume that she’s a sex worker. Maybe that’s my own internalized misogyny, reducing a woman to her sexual prowess just because she has giant false eyelashes and big plump lips. But then I saw an article that used a photo of the male version and I thought “oh, no it’s something else because that, too, is definitely a sexbot.”
So then I read on, and even this obvious glazing press release republished in full by a local news site includes the following paragraph buried near the bottom:
“Recent reporting has also identified Realbotix’s prior business ventures. Formerly known as Tokens.com, the company purchased sex doll company RealDoll in 2024.”
Ah. Yep, that checks out.
I wasn’t alone in noticing this, and a lot of bloggers and social media users ran with the news: some idiot school superintendent bought a sex doll to put in a classroom.
Realbotix did NOT appreciate that, though, and fairly quickly, articles started to get deleted or edited after the company got in touch. That local news piece was edited to include a statement from them, that reads in part:
“For clarity, some media reports have falsely connected the Salamanca project to an adult product or adult-products business. The Salamanca robot is a newly manufactured, purpose-built educational unit; no existing product or hardware is being modified or repurposed for the school. Realbotix LLC focuses exclusively on non-adult commercial applications, including healthcare and education. No adult-products company has any involvement in the Salamanca project or in any product or project developed by Realbotix LLC. Separate companies.”
Wow, sounds like the sex doll talk was straight up defamatory, huh? Well, no, at least not in my opinion. According to Gizmodo, Realbotix LLC is a subsidiary “of Realbotix Corp., which was known as Tokens.com until May 2024. That rename followed an April 2024 deal in which Tokens.com acquired Simulacra Corporation—a holding company whose subsidiaries included Realbotix LLC, Anthropomorphic Figure Dynamics, and a company called Abyss Creations.”
Abyss Creations is the manufacturer of RealDoll, the $6,000 lifesized sex doll.
I read all this verbatim because it seems to be what Realbotix LLC has approved and I don’t want to get sued but yeah, I find it pretty laughable how aggressively this company is trying to distance themselves from the sex dolls. In fact, I actually found this article from January of last year that states that while Realbotix’s flagship model, Aria, can’t provide “physical” intimacy, she was being marketed as a “companion” who can provide emotional intimacy. So, the girlfriend experience, basically. They then go on to say that she “isn’t just for romantic relationships either, as its construction “makes her suitable for industries requiring personal interaction with humans, such as education, research, healthcare, and entertainment.””
So, yeah, she isn’t a sexbot. You can’t have sex with her. She IS a “romance” bot. Great. Glad we sorted that out.
Why is this such a big deal? Well, it’s obvious why the idea of a sex robot in the classroom is such a clickable headline, and also why the company would prefer to avoid those headlines in a time when the far right seems obsessed with “grooming” happening in our schools.
But even though I mock the far right’s performative outrage over anything involving sex in classrooms, I do think it’s worth exploring why this specific doll is problematic. And don’t worry, I’m going to get to the other problems with this in a minute.
But I saw that the school superintendent addressed concerned parents, educators, and experts in this way, as described by the New York Times:
“If this looked like a golden retriever and did exactly the same thing, I don’t think we’d have as many people here,” Mr. Beehler said at the meeting. “But because it looks like a human, everybody seems to have some either excitement about it and are encouraged by it or have some concerns.”
That’s actually a great point. Why doesn’t the robot look like a golden retriever but do the exact same thing? Why does it look like anything at all? An AI “tutor” that answers questions or provides guidance can do that on a laptop, but obviously this company wants to sell a more expensive product, so they’ve made a “robot.” Why not make it a dog robot? Honestly, if it were a dog robot I would have a much harder time convincing people that this is an awful idea.
But it’s not a dog. It’s not a humanoid alien. It’s not a man. It’s not a kindly grandmother. It’s not a middle aged woman with average height, weight, and features. It’s a weird gooner’s idea of a perfect woman, which is how I and a bunch of other people immediately thought “sexbot” when we saw it. She has lip fillers. She has Instagram face. And why?
Like, sure, obviously if this is their “base model” that they change into whatever they need, and the thing they initially were selling was a “romance” doll, then it makes sense. But the company claims they can make it look like anything. According to the New York Times, the students picked her features, and presumably the school staff approved it. And I just gotta say: that’s so fucked up. It’s completely fucked up that everyone who contributed to this project could not imagine a submissive tutor that didn’t look like a female fuck doll.
Okay, I do find that to be an interesting debate, but let me just put the rest of this out there: even if she looked like a golden retriever, this would still be a complete disaster. The doll will log student IDs in order to build a history with each student that it can reference, which means it will be logging personal, sensitive information, and we know now that it doesn’t matter if that information includes the student’s name or photo: with enough personal information, you can figure out whose data this is. The superintendent even demonstrated the chatbot by pretending to be a student concerned about another student being suicidal! Imagine these poor kids needing to give that information to a fucking chatbot, which logs the information for future use. It’s a privacy nightmare, especially when you see how often AI companies fuck this up. For instance, last week a bunch of Redditors learned that Anthropic’s Claude chat logs were appearing in Google searches, unbeknownst to the people who chatted about sensitive medical information or their children’s names and phone numbers.
Further, it turns out that the school that was to be the trial run for this doll is 40% Native American. If you aren’t aware, the US and Canada have nasty histories of experimenting on Native children in schools, and these populations tend to be poorer and underserved. This doll cost a whopping $58,000. The superintendent swears it wasn’t going to replace any teachers, but that’s not the point. The point is that that money could have gone towards hiring an actual human tutor to help these kids. Or a counselor, or any number of school supplies or technologies that will actually benefit students.
Instead, they got a creepy doll that exists primarily to make a corporation money, by selling more to other schools and also by furthering the myth that AI is inevitable, that kids have to use it in order to survive the future. Bullshit. Wizard of Oz bullshit. And as Gizmodo points out, there’s nothing this company could tell me that would make me believe that they aren’t going to use this thing to train their other bots and make them “better,” probably to the point where they actually are sold to replace teachers.
It sucks and I hate it, and I applaud the locals who rallied together to yell at that superintendent until he finally paused the implementation of this thing. This shit is not inevitable, and if one of these dolls does ever end up in a poor, underserved high school, I hope it’s one that’s a lot like the one where I went to school because it would be a smoldering pile of silicone in the corner of the girls’ room by the end of the first week.
