Basically, anything that requires a lot of imagination to pull off, and can never actually be achieved by people in reality. But people have started doing them online (actually, I wonder if these fetishes existed before the Internet, and just had very frustrated practitioners).

I think that’s a really interesting facet of cybersex, the new and interesting aspects of sexuality it lets people explore. Or even, again, things they wouldn’t want to try in reality but enjoy in fantasy.

Well, cybering is very advanced if you go to the right places – the MUDs or MUCKs that specialize are what spring to mind most readily. I think the second explanation rings most true with me – most sex is probably boring and banal (not in content, just in attitude – after all, a good cybersex session can be heterosexual missionary position passionately described in detail by both sides).

And both kinds of sex have lots of room to improve upon, but I think it’s on an individual level more than as an art form (although another interesting thing about cybersex is the realms beyond reality that it can reach into – I read an article recently about that, but I can’t remember where – it’s fascinating, anyway.)

Very true. It really only works for the most vanilla, and the most banal, encounters–which unfortunately makes up the vast majority in certain venues.

If the 20-line chat bot succeeded in making most of its partners happy, what would that say about cybersex encounters’ quality in general?

That’s an important question, I think, but also a complicated one. The easy answer is that cybersex is depressing, low-level, juvenile, etc. Another possible answer is that the majority of real-sex could be classified the same way (Could the same five sex acts satisfy the average man/woman in bed the same way the same 20 lines could satisfy a cyberer?). I’d like to think there’s a third option though: the basic nature of cybering now means we’ve got so much more room to improve, so much more to learn…

I imagine, if you cherry-picked your lines, you could get quite far. – “Bot moans in pleasure.”, etc. I note, though, that the less mainstream the encounter becomes, the harder the programmers’ job – there’s an established ’storyboard’ for intercourse, but fetish play and so forth would be difficult to simulate.

Even if the bot wasn’t perfect, I imagine it would ‘get the job done’ for at least some chat participants.

If the 20-line chat bot succeeded in making most of its partners happy, what would that say about cybersex encounters’ quality in general? What does it say that we’re even considering the question? And why haven’t the Virtual Jenna, etc. companies tried a text version?

A lot of interesting questions come out of this.

It’s amazing how the topic went from simulated femininity to the relative lameness of star trek in so few posts.

While uninteresting as AI research, this flirt bot is interesting as research into human behavior. I’m quite curious if it is easier to scam one gender or the other through this method.

I suspect, that men would be much more highly susceptible (reflecting my perception of the gullibility and lack critical thinking present in my gender as a whole).