Workshop #1 – How Deep is Your Love?

In the fall of 2024, the Fucking Tech! project began and presented its foundations during the research project showcase day on Thursday, November 14, 2024 at the Centre Maurice Chalumeau. The conference started by recalling the project’s origins: research initiated in 2016 on sexbots by Saul Pandelakis and Anthony Masure. After presenting our work at the Contemporary Forms of Computer Imagination conference (University of Montpellier 3) and publishing it in the journal Res Futurae (“Desiring Machines: from sexbots to loving OS”, 2017). We then showed how much the “sex tech” landscape had changed between the research’s beginnings and the 2024 launch of Fucking Tech!. The proliferation of dolls, unclear product landscape, fallacious promises, objects with pedopornographic characteristics… were all discussed during the presentation. We then presented our objectives and deliverables: in year 1, a chatbot that generates erotic stories, StoryTellurX; in year 3, a collective book entitled Terra Incognita Sexualis mapping the possibilities of technologies for sex (sexbots, dolls, specialized AI…) The presentation concluded with an overview of upcoming work stages, including a workshop in January on virtual girlfriends and another in March on generating pornographic images with AI dedicated to this function. Here is how we envisioned our progress in year one: