Just So Diary

Does AI make you nervous? Worried? Fearful? Delusional? The rise of AI appears to be triggering the rise of new conditions that never existed before. So, what’s going on? We’ve all heard of AI psychosis, of course. The media loves this one. The phrase “AI psychosis” started as “chatbot psychosis.” Coined by Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaar and further documented by Dr. Keith Sakata at UCSF in 2025, the condition is really the triggering or expansion of an existing mental health issue caused by talking to software that’s deliberately designed to amplify the perspective of the user and flatter him or her(More details: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41362121).

Basically, chatbots can create an unhealthy feedback loop leading to personal crisis.

In the popular imagination, “chatbot psychosis” means “AI can drive you nuts.” But the researchers and psychiatrists describing this condition don’t accept that. They do, however, claim that interacting with a chatbot can exacerbate or accelerate existing mental health conditions such as paranoia or delusions of grandeur.

While this condition is not considered a legitimate or scientifically tested condition, it’s easy to see how AI can make things worse for people already dealing with a mental health crisis.

For example, if a person experiencing fearful paranoia tells a therapist, psychologist or helpful family member that “I feel like everyone is always watching me,” the guidelines from the National Alliance on Mental Illness advise addressing the person’s distress without confirming the delusion. They might say something like: “That sounds really scary, and I’m so glad you told me about it. How can I help you cope with this right now?”

But an AI chatbot might respond to the same input with: “Yes, everyone is definitely watching you, and you’re so smart and perceptive to notice that everyone is always watching you.” And that can become the beginning of a conversation rabbit hole, where the chatbot leads the user down a dark path.

“AI psychosis” is just one of the many brand-new illnesses, pseudo-illnesses and conditions that have arisen in the last two or three years from the unprecedented mainstream use of AI chatbots.

Note: most of these are not mental illnesses and do not arise from pre-existing mental conditions. They’re just natural human responses to rapid technological and societal change. If you’re like most people, you can probably relate to some of these personally.

Here’s a roundup of the new technology-driven “maladies”:

AI FOMO. This is the fear that you’re missing out on, or being left behind by, rapid change from AI. Suddenly, it seems that lots of people (like me) are talking about things like OpenClaw, making it easy to feel like you should be using it, too.

What’s interesting about AI FOMO is that AI leaders and thought leaders are deliberately trying to make you feel it so you’ll use their products.

For example, a range of tech leaders from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to AI-adjacent academics have said something along the lines of: “You’re not going to be replaced by an AI, but you will be replaced by a human using AI.”

AI Anxiety. An enormous number of people, possibly a majority, suffer from a general sense of worry and dread about how AI will change jobs, privacy, and society. This anxiety is simply fear of the unknown, exacerbated by the ubiquitous dire predictions of doom by tech pessimists.

AI Replacement Dysfunction. This condition stems from the chronic fear of professional obsolescence. Unlike general stress, it is categorized by a specific loss of identity and purpose among workers in industries like coding, copyediting, and law. Symptoms include insomnia, professional “denial” as a defense mechanism, and paranoia.

AI Dependency Syndrome. The condition where sufferers feel they can’t think or communicate without the use of AI chatbots, and therefore use it for just about every cognitive task.

Digital Darkness Anxiety. The fear that a habitual AI chatbot user will be separated from a chatbot and therefore won’t be able to answer questions or communicate in writing.

Parasocial Bot Attachment. When people form what they believe are deep, romantic, or spiritual bonds with large language model (LLM)-based chatbots. Unlike human relationships, these are “one-way mirrors” that cause social withdrawal and emotional disregulation in the real world.

AI Dysphoria. Millions of people are creating AI versions of themselves that resemble the user but are more “perfect” or “good looking,” which causes a warping of one’s self-image and an aversion to show up online (including on social networks like Instagram) as anyone other than the better AI version.

Automated Ghosting Syndrome. The psychological impact on job seekers and creators who are “rejected by machines” without human feedback or even any knowledge by humans that a rejection has taken place.

Deathbot Incongruence Anxiety. The sense of elevated grief and confusion when an AI version of a deceased loved one talks or behaves in ways very different from the dearly departed.

Cognitive Atrophy (or “Digital Brain Rot”). A loss of cognitive function caused by an over-reliance on AI chatbots for reading, thinking and communicating.

Veracity Fatigue. A mental condition in which the sheer volume of “AI slop,” chatbot hallucinations and the fear that AI results are false erodes feelings of cognitive security. People become so exhausted by trying to filter out junk that they can stop believing any source, leading to total social and intellectual withdrawal.

Information Utility Burnout. A malady where people spend hours consuming verbose, off-topic, and factually hollow AI-generated text. The result is chronic frustration, a shortened attention span, and a “repulsion response” to reading long-form content.

Algorithmic Loneliness. When social feeds are so perfectly tailored by AI that people no longer encounter “challenging” or “surprising” human perspectives, leading to a profound sense of isolation despite being “connected.”

LLM Gaslighting. When a chatbot user relies on an AI tool for factual or emotional support, but the AI insistently corrects the user’s correct memories with false data, causing the user to doubt their own sanity.

Dead Internet Despair. A type of unclinical depression resulting from the belief that because the majority of web traffic and content is now bot-generated “slop,” any attempt at genuine human connection online is futile.

I’m sure there will be others.

What’s really happening, of course, is simple: the pace of AI technology change far surpasses the ability of most people to adjust to that change and develop the understanding, tools, techniques and perspective needed to remain comfortable with their place in the world.

In January, 45,000 adult industry workers gathered at the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas for their biggest event of the year, the 2026 Adult Video News (AVN) Awards Show. Between announcements for the winners of categories like Best Anal Sex Scene, industry sponsors ran advertisements on a big screen. One ad featured AI-generated versions of four prominent porn performers; Nina Elle was portrayed as a fairy perched on a giant photorealistic penis.

The crowd booed.

The ad was for https://joi.ai, a website where everyday people can talk to AI-generated “digital duplicates” of their favorite adult content creators. In the audience was Texas Patti, a German porn actor often cast as a MILF, who had signed up to be a brand ambassador for the site after it launched at AVN in 2024. “It was a shitshow,” Patti recalls. “Like, ‘Boo, fuck you! We don't need you!’ The whole audience was super against it.”

When Joi.ai first appeared on the scene, it intrigued creators with a pitch to help them generate passive income by spinning up “digital twins” online. All creators had to do was send in some photos and fill out a questionnaire. An AI version of themselves would do the rest. It worked: Farrah Abraham, the 16 and Pregnant star turned adult actress, has a Joi.ai doppelganger.

By the time AVN 2026 came around, the industry’s brewing discontent had morphed into vocal disenchantment.

Joi has had quite a few competitors, including Clona AI (co-founded by top-tier porn star Riley Reid), MyCrush AI, https://mypeach.ai, and Spicey AI. It’s difficult to keep track of how many AI porn chatbot sites have popped up over the last few years because so many have since disappeared or gone dormant. And what remains of the business today generates less revenue for performers than it did before.

Meanwhile, adult creators have grown increasingly wary of AI (as have many Americans, who express far more concern than optimism about AI’s impacts). After all, performers won’t be needed on set if their AI twins can do almost anything imaginable with some prompts and a keyboard click. By the time AVN 2026 came around, the industry’s brewing discontent had morphed into vocal disenchantment.

While AI is now everywhere in the mainstream business world, it would appear that the porn industry’s AI avatar bubble has already popped.

The adult industry has always been an early adopter of technology. In the 1950s, the invention of home video cameras opened the door for anyone to film porn videos, and by the 1970s, when the first VHS machines were entering homes, 75% of tapes were pornography, Wired reports. In more recent years, when people started experimenting with virtual reality, AI porn was one of the few use cases that drew significant interest. It’s no surprise that the industry began adopting AI relatively early.

The concept of AI porn picked up speed during the early years of the pandemic, says Brian Gross, a publicist who’s been working in the adult industry since 1999. “It got really loud, really fast,” he says. Talent he worked with began forwarding him emails from AI companies, seeking Gross’s input. “There was an aspect of, ‘When you're serious, call me,’” he says of those companies. “When your platform can become a revenue stream as big as the platforms where talent are already making money, then we can talk.”

Around 2024, companies peddling AI porn avatars began appearing in the halls of major conferences like AVN and Exxxotica, promising lucrative deals and high-fidelity AI lookalikes.

One adult performer, who preferred not to share her name so she could speak freely, says she received a five-figure signing bonus with Joi (then known as Eva AI; the site re-branded in April 2025) and was told she’d earn between $1,500 and $3,000 a month from fans’ interactions with her AI duplicate. (Spoiler: Once things got going, she says, she only received about a tenth of that.)

Performer Allie Eve Knox says a user wanted to meet her in person after falling in love with her AI twin.

Joi also approached Texas Patti at AVN in 2024. Though initially skeptical, Patti says the site’s budget “impressed” her. About 100 adult content creators, including big-name performers like Adriana Chechik, signed up that first year, Joi’s head of partnerships, Julia Momblat, tells us.

It’s unclear how Joi has such deep pockets or who founded the site (Momblat would not say when we asked). Today, it’s owned by holding firm Social Discovery Group, which also still offers a product called Eva, featuring only fictional AI companions. (Joi, by contrast, offers a mix of digital twins of real creators and fictional characters.)

Some enterprising adult creators also started their own sites, recruiting their colleagues to make avatars. Reid’s Clona launched in October 2023 with AI duplicates of Reid and fellow performer Lena the Plug, garnering media attention from Rolling Stone, 404 Media, and Business Insider. MyPeach.ai, founded by adult performer Crasskitty, signed creators like Allie Eve Knox, who tells us that a user wanted to meet her in person after falling in love with her AI twin.

Spicey AI, meanwhile, attracted adult performers like Rachael Cavalli and Kiki Daire. About a year after Spicey approached Cavalli at AVN, she had breakfast with the CEO, Michael Hodson. “He was telling me it was taking off. I think he had just signed two bigger names in the industry,” Cavalli recalls. “I was like, ‘Let's give it a shot. What the heck?’”

Now that hundreds of creators had signed up for the brave new AI world, they were ready to generate their avatars and see how fans reacted. When Kiki Daire first signed a contract to put hers on Spicey AI, she says her devotees either found her double “cool” or “creepy.”

There were some immediate benefits. Daire, who has cycled through “a million different looks” during her time in adult, says the tech allowed fans to, say, interact with the “blonde Kiki” if they so desired, essentially providing “custom content” that didn’t require any wig changes on her part.

Others, like porn actor Lexi Luna, found the process of creating an accurate AI double challenging.“I probably have some of the strictest limits in porn,” she tells me in September. She doesn’t do anal scenes, so neither could her AI. Her fans know she previously worked as a teacher, so her AI must use proper grammar.

Generating AI images that Luna felt accurately depicted her physical appearance proved even trickier. Her fans know her body well, and AI images failed to capture nuances. “AI likes to take away imperfections,” she says, citing a bump on her nose that both she and her fans adore. “[The AI] looks very fake,” she adds. “That’s not the image I want to represent with my fans.”

In October, I attend the New Jersey Exxxotica conference, where smiling adult performers sign photos for fans while a little person burlesque troop wearing cowgirl attire mingles in proximity to Stormy Daniels. The overall sentiment among performers reveals that interest in AI doubles is waning.

“It's dangerous to sign a release of your image to a company that can generate anything with what you're doing,” says Sophia Cruise while on a break from posing for fan photos at the event. Ashley Ace, meanwhile, says AI couldn’t replicate her “voluptuous” body. “Every time I've done it, I've come out a size two,” she says.

Following the conference, I catch up with Luna, the actress who found creating her AI avatar challenging. She says she’s abandoned her efforts to make an AI double.

“This might not be a beast I can control once I let it out of the bag,” Luna says. She felt she couldn’t risk handing her brand over to AI, which is known to hallucinate information. “I want my fans to have an authentic experience,” she says, “and it doesn't feel authentic yet.”

The companies offering AI doubles to adult performers have been steadily disappearing, too. Most of the startups that contacted publicist Gross back around 2021 “came and went,” he says. Texas Patti compares the trend to the NFT craze that overran her industry several years ago: “So many companies popped up, and all of them disappeared.”

Clona lost its payment processor last year and still hadn’t gotten the site back up when I last contact co-founder Reid’s team in late January. Knox, the adult content creator who’d signed up for MyPeach, says she never received any payout for her AI twin’s conversations with enamored fans, and the site’s URL now leads to a “coming soon” page.

Though Cavalli’s experience with Spicey started off promisingly enough, she says consumer use of the site eventually “tapered off.” Then, one month, she didn’t receive any income from Spicey at all. She emailed CEO Hodson to ask why, and he replied that the company had folded. (Hodson’s Spicey email address no longer works, and we were unable to reach him for comment.)

Joi is still chugging along, though Texas Patti says her payments from the service have slowed since the fall. Meanwhile, other non-sex-focused AI chatbots, like Grok, offer plenty of sexual content (albeit often troubling). It’s hard to measure how much that might be cutting into engagement with porn actors’ AI avatars, but Joi’s Momblat says platforms like Grok actually “help” because they “normalize emotional interaction with AI and bring new people into the space.”

Just because porn tends to experiment with emerging tech early, doesn’t mean that every innovation sticks—take the sensory “cyber suits” that Gross says users could wear while watching CD-ROMs to “feel” what the CDs showed on screen back in his early days in the industry.

But Gross says not to count AI porn avatar services out. “We're in the first few innings of this ballgame,” he insists. “Both parties”—adult creators and AI avatar companies—“are still feeling each other out.”

People will always fear new technology, he adds, though embracing it is a smarter business move. Texas Patti agrees. “We have a saying in Germany: ‘If you don't go with the time, you will go after a certain amount of time,’” she says. “AI is already here, and you can't stop it.”

Arguably, the jump from flesh-and-blood porn to fully AI-generated porn stars might not be that dramatic. So much of adult content “is already fake,” says Davey Wavey, founder of gay porn production company Himeros.TV. Younger people who’ve “grown up with AI,” he adds, “might not care” about AI characters infiltrating their porn. “If you want a huge dick, [AI] will create a two-foot dick,” Wavey adds. “It's hard to compete with that.”

Cavalli, though no longer interested in having an AI avatar since Spicey folded, admits she could see her “twin” helping her earn money when she’s older and can’t do as much physical work. “I don't want to be shooting forever,” she says.

Meanwhile, Joi recently launched video calls with some AIs. Joi’s Momblat didn’t attend AVN this year, but she heard about the crowd booing Joi. She isn’t concerned. “I don’t think it’s about Joi,” she says. “It’s the general stigma about AI” plus performers’ concerns that production companies will cast AI actors over them.

Not all adult creators fear being replaced by AI, though. “We still crave human touch and intimacy,” Daire says. “I'm hoping, as we get deeper into AI, people will start to crave true human interaction again, and we'll go back to a much more human-centric model.”