AI is already reshaping how we work, shop, and communicate, so it was only a matter of time before the conversation turned to intimacy. AI-powered sex toys, chatbots, and companions promise personalization, convenience, and pleasure on demand. Some can learn exactly what you like and repeat it flawlessly. Others simulate a partner entirely. But can any of that replicate what actually makes intimacy feel human? We put the question to Samantha Marshall, Head of Brand at Smile Makers Collection.
Is there a real business case for AI-powered sex toys?
Some brands are already exploring AI-driven vibrators that learn and repeat a person's preferences automatically. It's a genuinely useful idea on the surface: no more guesswork, just a pattern that reliably works. "Every toy we design has to make sense, add to the user's experience, and not be gimmicky," Samantha explains. For now, that's kept AI off the product roadmap, not out of principle alone, but because the gap she sees isn't a technical one. "We look at where the gap is, and that's in people understanding their bodies, and how sexuality and pleasure can change throughout life." That's a harder problem to solve with an algorithm than it might first appear.
“We look at where the gap is, and that's in people understanding their bodies, and how sexuality and pleasure can change throughout life."
Can AI really personalize pleasure?
There's a real upside here. An AI-programmed vibrator could help someone identify exactly what works for them and return to it easily. But Samantha points to the flip side too: "It gives them a perfectly programmed experience each time. It can distort what real partnered sex is, and change our expectations negatively." Real intimacy rarely runs on a repeatable sexual script, and a technology optimized for consistency may quietly teach us to expect something sex was never built to deliver.
What about data and privacy?
Sex, solo or partnered, is about as personal as data gets. Handing that over to an algorithm raises real questions about who holds it, how it's used, and what happens when something this intimate gets reduced to inputs and outputs. There's also a subtler risk: pleasure that's tracked too closely can start to feel performative rather than personal, measured rather than felt, which cuts against the very thing that makes it enjoyable in the first place. It's one thing to understand your own patterns. It's another to have them logged, analyzed, and potentially monetized by a system you don't fully understand.
Could AI change how we connect with each other?
This might be the bigger question. AI companions are, by nature, entirely focused on one person's experience. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Solo exploration matters (a lot), and it's often the starting point for better partnered intimacy too. But it raises a genuine concern about what a purely self-focused technology teaches us about partnered sex, where pleasure, communication, and consent go both ways. There's also the question of loneliness. AI intimacy could genuinely help some people feel less alone. It could just as easily make it easier to avoid the harder, more rewarding work of connecting with another person.
That risk isn't hypothetical. A 2026 study from BYU's Wheatley Institute found that 1 in 7 young adults already in a real-life relationship regularly interact with an AI romantic companion, often without their partner's knowledge, and that this use was linked to lower relationship stability and poorer communication with their actual partner. Researchers described the pull of these companions as a kind of counterfeit intimacy, simulated compassion and encouragement that can feel real enough to lean on, even though it only runs one way.
"What makes sex human and beautiful is the intimacy, the clumsiness, and the fun moments of exploring each other and oneself.”
"What makes sex human and beautiful is the intimacy, the clumsiness, and the fun moments of exploring each other and oneself," Samantha says. "Imperfect is beautiful, in a way." A simulation built to be flawless may struggle to teach us anything about navigating the very real, occasionally clumsy business of being with another person.
Where do vibrators fit into this?
It's worth separating AI-powered tools from sex toys more broadly. Traditional vibrators aren't designed to replicate a partner or predict a perfect outcome. At Smile Makers Collection, every vibrator in the collection is named after a fantasy, built as a springboard for imagination rather than an algorithm chasing a repeatable result. The experience stays led by the person using it, not a system learning to anticipate them. And unlike AI companions, they're just as built for two people as they are for one, which is arguably where the real difference lies.
So, can AI replace intimacy?
Probably not, at least not yet, and maybe not ever in the way that matters most. Researchers studying what's now being called "pseudo-intimacy" have raised a similar concern in a recent Frontiers in Psychology paper: that leaning on AI for empathy and validation, without the friction of a real relationship, risks quietly eroding the emotional resilience we usually build through conflict and repair with another person. Their conclusion lands remarkably close to Samantha's. As we design machines that can mimic affection, they write, we shouldn't lose sight of the irreplaceable, messy, and beautiful nature of real emotional connection.
AI can personalize, predict, and simplify, but intimacy has always relied on the parts that resist simplifying: presence, vulnerability, and the occasional fumble (remember, sex is supposed to be fun). Technology may well have a role to play in sexual wellness eventually. The real question isn't whether AI can replicate intimacy, but whether it's being built with enough care not to flatten it in the process.
