DISCUSSION: FUTURE SEX

From the moment the chatbot ELIZA was created in the 1960s, intimacy was already entwined with artificial intelligence. Users poured secrets into its simple scripts, mistaking code for care. Decades later, with generative AI and social robots, that impulse has only intensified: people fall in love with chatbots, seek comfort in machines, and outsource emotional labour to algorithms built to listen, soothe, or seduce. What futures of sex emerge when machines take on roles once reserved for humans? Writer and academic Kate Devlin and media scholar Ania Malinowska will explore the terrain of digital intimacy and the future of sex in conversation with journalist and educator Aga Kozak.