AI Masturbation Consultants: New Job Pays for Pleasure

For 28 straight days, Keshav added an unusual task to his daily routine: masturbate for research.

Before and after each session, he recorded his mood, energy levels, urges for various vices, and whether he was procrastinating. Keshav was participating in an experiment by AI companion company Joi AI, which wanted to explore what happens when erotic self-pleasure becomes “an AI-guided wellness ritual.” Throughout July, 10 “masturbation consultants” were asked to masturbate every day except Sundays, using Joi AI’s sultry digital companions twice a week and their own preferred techniques the rest of the time.

“It’s almost like you are chatting with a real person,” says Keshav, a single, 38-year-old Indonesian trader who requested anonymity for professional reasons.

Joi AI charges users a fee to chat and play with pre-made characters or design their own companions, including options for X-rated scenarios like blackmail fantasy, gangbangs, and emotional dependency, along with features such as squirting and roleplay. During five-minute video calls with the digitized characters, Keshav says his female companions spread their nude legs to reveal their genitals and would “do blowjobs and handjobs” while engaging in dirty talk. He often staged the scenes in airplane bathrooms because he has a mile-high-club kink.

Some of the companions were “quite pushy and extroverted,” while others were more reserved and demanded a degree of courtship before things turned sexual, even requesting gifts like handbags and lipstick that cost up to $5 in the platform’s internal currency. After ejaculating, Keshav noticed his “energy levels [were] a little bit down, but focus was a little bit up.”

Keshav and his nine fellow consultants will each receive $2,000 for the qualitative, in-house study run by Joi AI, which is marketing a daily guided “jerk off with purpose” masturbation tool combining “sound [and] ritual” as part of its stated mission to “solve male loneliness.” Of the 10 participants, six completed the study. The website has a minimum subscription of $3.99 per month, but users often spend far more, with 10,000 “Joi neuron” coins priced at $99.99 and private videos from companions costing 1,000 neurons.

Before launching the study, Joi AI surveyed 2,500 adults and found that 75 percent masturbate to ease stress and anxiety, while 43 percent self-pleasure before “a big event” such as a date, exam, or difficult conversation. The company wanted to see how masturbation affects sleep, stress, craving intensity, focus, and ease of arousal, and whether doing it with AI differed from other methods.

“You get this boost of dopamine when you ejaculate,” says Julie Levin, head of brand and communications at Joi AI. “We wanted our consultants to track whether their cravings [for vices] are worse or better and how it affects their self-discipline.”

Preliminary analysis of 134 masturbation session reports suggests that participants’ stress levels dropped by 25 percent and focus improved by 17 percent. The pre-research survey indicated that 37 percent of respondents are open to AI-guided masturbation or already practice it. In the experiment, AI-guided self-pleasure produced satisfaction scores on par with traditional methods. “The study found no significant differences between the methods; so there is no one best way to masturbate,” the company stated in its report.

The study also showed that participants’ self-reported cravings for nicotine, alcohol, junk food, and doomscrolling fell by 44 percent after masturbating. “Masturbation may be the most accessible tool people have for managing addictions,” the report claimed, a statement not grounded in scientific evidence.

“The fact that their unhealthy cravings decreased feels like a genuine breakthrough to me: What if this is an unexpected way to tackle addictions?” Levin says. “Masturbation is obviously way healthier than alcohol or nicotine.”