Morning boners on a Monday morning? I’m spoiling you. Here’s two things for this week, which includes an ace blog about morning boners, a romantic artificial intelligence engine, and a chance to be interviewed about your sex life. I realise this is rapidly expanding into ‘more than two things’, which I hope you’ll see as a bonus rather than a flagrant disregard for my self-imposed brief. Here we go…
Good: InnocentLoverboy’s morning boners
Yeah, OK, I am a total sucker for blog posts which centre almost entirely around someone’s boner. But also I am fascinated by the cool and surprising things other people’s bodies do, and I love Innocent Loverboy’s writing – he’s funny and warm and his blog always makes me smile.
Normally I’d include an excerpt, but I think you need to read the full thing to see why I love his matter-of-fact and oh-so-horny description of morning boners, so click through and read the post here: Unbreakable
Fascinating: Google’s AI is reading romance
Google engineers are giving their Artificial Intelligence romance novels to read. Not because it’s lonely or anything, but because it should help the machine get more ‘conversational.’
“An artificial intelligence engine, also known as a neural network, is a computing system that can learn and adapt based on inputs. Understanding how to process and appropriately respond to human language is a huge challenge within artificial intelligence research. Most of Google’s products rely on computers responding to human language, and so the team at Google has been feeding these steamy reads into the engine to expand its vocabulary and creative abilities. The AI system then writes sentences and compares them to those it has read, trying to get closer and closer to the style and tone of best-selling bodice rippers.”
I wanted to share this not only because I know there are romance writers who follow me (a computer might be reading your book this very instant! And isn’t that cool?!) but also because I love the implications it can have for sex robots.
One of the most common hurdles to thinking about artificially intelligent sex machines is ‘well, what if they were like Siri? Siri is crap, and understands nothing.’ Well, using this technique (similar to the technique used to teach the computer AlphaGo to play well enough to beat a top-ranked human) could bring conversational intelligence much closer to what we see in movies like AI and Her.
And as regular readers probably know, I am obsessed with the question of whether a human could love a sex robot.
Shameless self-promotion section
I’ve been nominated for ‘Best Erotic Journalist’ in the ETO Awards, which is awesome. I’m up against some incredible people, so if you fancy giving me your vote you might help me not lose embarrassingly. If you’d like to, the voting form is here. You need to be registered with the site to vote, but registration’s free and anyone who’s in the adult industry can register – writers, bloggers, journalists, companies, and people who make latex pants on Etsy (probably).
Want to be interviewed for a podcast?
The excellent sex writer Alix Fox is making a brand new podcast, which sounds awesome. The aim of it is “to give an honest, educational and thought-provoking overview of a wide variety of different sexual experiences, which aren’t always discussed or represented in mainstream media.” She’s asked me if I can put her in touch with anyone to interview – it’s audio, and you can be anonymous if you like, and anywhere in the UK. She’s looking to cover the following topics, and if you’re interested please do email her [email protected]
– Couples to speak to me about what sex is like when trying for a baby. They might be attempting to conceive without medical intervention, or they might be using IVF or some other method.– Men who think they have small penises to speak to me in detail about how this has affected their attitude to sex and intimacy throughout their lives.– People who’ve been experimenting with strap-ons: this may be lesbians, women pegging men, or older or disabled gents trying to solve erectile issues.