I recently met a young woman named Wild Rose on an online chat forum. We struck up a conversation and within the first five minutes, Wild Rose – who is married, has a daughter, and lives in Texas with her in-laws – started telling me about her lover, a man called Saeran. Saeran, she told me, is the illegitimate son of a politician who had grown up with an abusive mother. He is handsome, has white blond hair, golden eyes, a large tattoo on his shoulder. Wild Rose said that when she first met him, her "heart literally ached" and her cheeks "flooded with blood". She then paused and added: "But I don't think Saeran loves me the way I love him. I'll never know his true feelings."

"If you say things that are particularly assholeish to Cortana, she will get mad," Deborah Harrison says. As a writer for Windows' female-voiced virtual assistant, she should know. At a 2015 tech conference, Harrison told delegates that "a good chunk" of user inquiries were about Cortana's sex life, something Microsoft was working to curb. Siri, Alexa, x.ai's meeting-schedule bot "Amy" and even traffic update assistant Robin have all been subjected to the sexual advances of their male users. That there's a market for virtual sex is unsurprising.

An article for the MIT Technology Review has raised concerns about the potential for our intimacy with artificial intelligence (AI) to be exploited for insidious ends. Its author, Liesl Yearsley, shares her perspective as the former CEO of Cognea, which built virtual agents using a mixture of structured and deep learning. Yearsley observed during her tenure at Cognea that humans were becoming more and more dependent on AI not just to perform tasks, but also to provide emotional and platonic support. "This phenomenon occurred regardless of whether the agent was designed to act as a personal banker, a companion, or a fitness coach" Yearsley wrote -- people would volunteer secrets, dreams, and even details of their love lives. This may not necessarily be bad.