At the same time it might feed into the objectification of women which will actively harm the needs of half the population.

Is this implying that male versions won't exist?

You would have to make them a lot funnier.

Install dad jokes 9000

Objectification of men is a far less alarming issue in our patriarchal society.

Not if it displaces women as sex objects. Women can still be objectified by any other metric of usefulness, but at that point will reach parity with men.

To paraphrase, even after AGI, many livelihoods will somehow still depend on men employing bad judgement.

The general impression I get from the article (and similar reports) is that patrons of sex workers in general do not seek the mechanical aspects of sex. They also do not seek power. What the largest majority seek is validation.

The big breakthrough would be robots that provided the emotional need of human connection and validation. If the mind could be tricked into a similar state as being in the center of a strong social network, then not only would that serve human needs optimally it would also be the single biggest health boost given.

There's a community of people who really seek out "AI girlfriends". Once or twice a year I sort of peek in and see what they are doing.

What surprises me is how bad the tech is. It's "mediocre chatbot" level currently and yet these people are VERY happy with it, spending hundreds a month and having all sort of custom artwork done.

For a meaningful percentage of the pop, very low fidelity tech, even at an extreme price, is enough.

that’s fascinating.

can you point to anything where one could start exploring this area further?

"Replika" was the app most of them were buzzing around last I checked. There was some boondoggle with paid plans, I think the app had tried to focus on that subcommunity as whales (singly focused big spenders).

Probably start there and see where they've gone now.

Not exactly AI girlfriend territory but has a lot of overlap with it (as well as a lot of overlap with mental illness and probably occasionally just plain old cringy teenagers) but r/waifuism is also pretty similar.