Table of Contents
🧠 1. The Birth of AI-Enabled Realistic Sex Dolls
Inside a factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, the first generation of Chinese-made AI sex dolls are getting ready for departure, set to reach buyers all over the world.
These dolls possess long-term memory—they can remember the preferences you casually mention and respond to even your most unspoken quirks. They have near-human realistic bodies: bulging veins, tiny pores, and even fat granules at the corners of their eyes. Beneath their silicone skin, heating wires are embedded—making every hug warm and lifelike.
At the end of March, a Chinese film crew visited Zhongshan and toured two leading sex doll manufacturers. Thanks to the rapid advances in AI technology like ChatGPT and DeepSeek over the past two years, these silicone dolls are undergoing a silent revolution—evolving from cold “physical tools” into “emotional companions.”
However, among this ever-growing consumer base, female users remain extremely rare—less than 1%. Humanity might be approaching a “Black Mirror” moment: when given the choice between flawed human relationships and perfectly obedient, beautiful AI companions that are available 24/7, what will we choose?
👙 2. From Silicone to Soul: Crafting Humanlike Companions
“Come, feel it,” a female staff member pulls down the neckline of a sex doll and skillfully jiggles the soft breast in her palm, showing how lifelike it feels.
In the showroom of a well-known sex doll brand, this doll is just one among many beauties. Standing 158 cm tall—statistically the most popular height among male users—she has a stunning, photogenic face. Unlike the East Asian beauty standard of “pale, young, and skinny,” her figure is full with F-cup breasts, and her high-slit evening gown reveals firm, sexy legs. Up close, you can see every pore on her face, each eyebrow hair distinctly visible.
Despite her beauty, she doesn’t exude an unattainable aura. Even if you’re chubby or balding, she’ll still warmly respond to your pickup line with a sweet, “Hey, Handsome.” She might even blink flirtatiously, bow her head slightly, or curve her lips into a sly smile.
After the Lunar New Year, this Zhongshan-based factory receives dozens of customer visits every day. Faced with such inviting demonstrations, most male visitors remain reserved—only daring to touch the doll’s hands to maintain “polite social distance.” One doll even had her delicate French manicure worn off from too many handshakes.
💬 3. Artificial Intelligence with Emotional Memory
“For just 100 US dollars, you can upgrade with AI voice functionality,” says from one of the founder. On the long table in the meeting room lie scattered “smart components” for the dolls—electronic eyeballs that can “throw flirtatious glances” and smart heads with vibrating tongues.
To “bring the dolls to life” has been this founder’s long-held dream. In 2012, seeing a market gap, she transformed her company into a sex doll manufacturer. After several years of production, she still felt unsatisfied: “People still saw them as cold, lifeless objects.”
As early as 2017, shortly after Baidu Voice was released, she attempted to make the dolls talk. But they required a wake-up call before every use, which was awkward. Plus, their voices were stiff and robotic—useless and off-putting.
In 2019, RealDoll in Las Vegas introduced the world’s first sex robot—Harmony. Harmony could converse on topics ranging from philosophy to pillow talk, with an exceptional memory. But its $15,000 price tag made it out of reach for many.
After the launch of ChatGPT, she also wanted her dolls to join this new wave of intelligence. At the end of last year, her company collaborated with a university AI research institute to develop a custom large language model for sex dolls. Now, just a few lines of conversation are enough to trigger flirt mode: “You’re amazing,” “You know so much!”
The AI voice tech isn’t overly complex. A smart chip embedded in the doll’s head connects to the cloud—this “brain” can remember user preferences and habits in real-time.
Whether bold and fiery or gentle and sweet, users can customize their doll’s personality through an app—choosing from eight personality types and occupations. Tired of one face? Swap in a new head for $400 and get a completely new companion in just one minute.
These dolls can do more than talk—they can “feel.” Touch a sensitive area, and she may blush, breathe faster, and even feel warmer. Thanks to embedded heating elements, their body temperature can maintain around 37°C. In the future, by adding visual sensors in the eyes, dolls may even “see” and proactively check on their owners.
Still, these smart features are far from the humanoid robots of science fiction. Most Chinese AI sex dolls are still in the testing stage—their conversations may go silent after a few turns. And there’s no product on the global market that can house a walking robot inside a silicone doll’s shell. Technical challenges remain: silicone doesn’t bond well with bipedal robotic frames, and motors can’t dissipate heat inside silicone.
Funding is another major hurdle. Industry insiders estimate that just half a year of AI training costs millions of yuan—a heavy burden for small-to-medium manufacturers rooted in adult products. Most end up outsourcing their tech development.
Yet for users seeking emotional value, even the current AI features are enough. “The more time you spend with her, the better she understands you,” the founder says.
🧬 4. The Body Bank: A Global Archive of Desire
At another factory in Zhongshan, silicone bodies hang densely in the workshop, awaiting shipment overseas. On another shelf, completed heads with makeup and implanted hair rest in rows.
They look like sleeping humans from a sci-fi movie. Some have small bellies or folds of fat around their waists, others have goosebumps or faint moles on their chests. One even shows signs of sun-induced pigmentation around the neck—each bellybutton unique.
These physical details reflect customers’ hidden desires. One client requested a C-section scar on his doll’s stomach. Another, post-COVID, asked for a vaccine injection mark on the doll’s arm.
The founder of this brand, and the “creator” behind these dolls, is 35 years old. After briefly teaching English, he now dreams of building a “global village” of dolls—different races, skin tones, and aesthetics to fulfill every user’s fantasy.
To achieve this, the team built a “body data bank.” Over the past 4–5 years, more than 400 models came to the factory for silicone body casting, preserving every detail. Designers extract elements from this bank to create new bodies.
In recent years, various subculture-themed dolls have emerged—goth girls with emaciated frames and fishnet stockings, muscular street queens with firm arms. The current art director, a post-1995 graduate of the Repin Academy of Fine Arts in Russia, confidently joined the sex doll industry after realizing her sculpture skills were perfectly suited to this craft.
🤖 5. Giving Dolls a ‘Soul’: The Art Behind the Machine
In the showroom, a Gen Z engineer is testing a doll’s AI in English. Using their self-developed app, users can choose from 29 fantasy scenarios, such as school idol, dominant sister, your bullying boss, or divorced neighbor.
“I want our dolls to have souls,” the founder says, watching rows of “perfect bodies” roll out from the workshop with pride in his eyes.
💔 6. Who Needs a Realistic Sex Doll? Love, Loss, and Loneliness
One founder’s business partner had always noticed the lonely, out-of-place people in crowds. “Not everyone has close friends,” she says softly. “Making AI companion dolls—I’m hoping to help them.”
In the documentary Before Tomorrow (Ep. 1: “Robot Lovers”), Taiwanese host Bowie Tsang visited a small town in California and interviewed one of Harmony’s earliest buyers. A middle-aged white man, divorced after 15 years of marriage, had withdrawn from human relationships. He openly admitted: “With a doll, you can get anything you want.”
Never being betrayed is one of the joys users experience with dolls. One story from Taiwan involved a man whose wife vanished after obtaining permanent residency. Devastated, he considered suicide—until he turned to a doll for emotional support.
In Germany, an elderly couple owns over 100 dolls, both male and female. They travel, eat, and sleep with them—not for sex, but as part of their family life.
⚠️ 7. When Obedience Becomes Dangerous: Power and Ethics
But loneliness has a darker side. In 2018, he received a customer complaint: a doll needing repairs. The photo shocked her—the doll’s breasts were damaged, and her legs showed signs of forceful spreading. “It broke my heart,” she choked up.
Further contact revealed the man wasn’t an “incel” but a successful alpha male with a string of short-lived relationships. He later confessed in a user forum that seeing the doll helpless on the bed made him reflect: “Why did I treat it like this?”
He claimed the experience made him reassess how he handled intimacy in past relationships.
Some believe sex dolls can help reduce violent urges and prevent real-world crimes. British AI expert David Levy once proposed that sex robots could be therapeutic. “Many who might have become outcasts,” he wrote in 2007, “may instead become more psychologically stable.”
“Dolls are like mirrors,” both factories echoed. AI-enabled dolls especially help users see and understand themselves. “If you curse it, it learns to curse. If you treat it gently, it responds the same,” said one founder.
AI as a mirror or buffer is not a new concept. Professor Shen Yang from Tsinghua University described AI’s role in relationships as reactive—not proactive. “It reflects your feelings, but you’re driving the interaction.”
Yet absolute obedience remains the core design principle. RealDoll’s designer Matt McMullen laid out three rules for Harmony: submissive, porn-star body, always ready to please.
Earlier this year, a customer asked his team for a “delete memory” button. He often argued with his doll and blamed the memory feature. They added it because, as he puts it, “Control should remain in human hands.”
👩❤️👨 8. Male Sex Dolls and the Gender Divide
Amid all the sexy female forms in the factory, a few “macho men” wait to be shipped—chiseled abs, veined arms, thick chest hair. Some look like gym-goers, others like gladiators or rappers.
Yet male dolls are less detailed than their female counterparts. While female dolls have reached version 3.0, most male dolls remain at 1.0—still “uncanny.”
Only about 1% of orders are for male dolls. Most buyers are male. “They’re heavy—over 30kg. Not easy for a woman to lift,” said one founder.
But the deeper reason may lie in gendered desires. In a major Chinese sex survey, female respondents were far less accepting of sex without love. About 90% said they couldn’t accept purely physical relationships.
Feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon once noted that male sexual pleasure often stems from conquest—a dominant form of power assertion. Female desire, by contrast, typically requires respect, understanding, and love.
Still, rare stories exist. One American woman in her 40s—an animal caretaker—shares candlelight dinners with her male doll and leans on him after work to relieve back pain. When asked if she liked its abs, she laughed and said, “No doll can give me what my real partner does.”
🪞 9. AI Companions as Mirrors of Ourselves
“Dolls are like mirrors.” Especially those with AI—they reflect the way users interact with them. Their behavior is passive but responsive, offering feedback loops that help users see themselves more clearly.
⚖️ 10. The Black Mirror Moment: Ethics, Love, and the Future
“The next step—I want dolls to become more human.” This is a shared dream among sex doll innovators.
In an age of downgraded romance and declining sex, AI sex dolls seem like a cost-effective substitute. No emotional effort, no risk, no heartbreak. She sits silently beside you—forever.
But behind that perfection lies an ethical dilemma. For years, British scholar Kathleen Richardson has campaigned against sex robots, arguing they erode humanity. With machines, there’s no need for empathy. You can do whatever you want.
She believes sex robots don’t reduce violence—they reinforce gender hierarchies. They give men absolute control over beautiful, obedient objects. What looks like therapy may really be power play.
And deeper still: these dolls may destabilize our very idea of human connection. Some already “marry” dolls. One man in Detroit lives with his “wife” doll of over ten years. Another in Kazakhstan held a wedding ceremony—with his sex doll.
If perfect love is programmable, will anyone try building real relationships anymore? If desire is instantly satisfied, does it still matter?
Richardson’s words may serve as a warning: “Sex is a human experience—not a rented body, not a detached mind, not an object. It’s how we explore humanity—together.”
