“Blowjob article”: scientists processed 109 hours of oral sex to develop an AI that sucks a member
Hello, Habr! I present to you the translation of Samantha Cole 's article from motherboard.vice.com.
Autoblow AI, a sex toy for users with a penis, consists of a rubber sleeve and an electric motor located inside the body, and tries to imitate oral sex. Her Indiegogo campaign was launched last week and quickly reached its $ 50,000 goal. Its main advantage over the previous model, Autoblow 2, released in 2014, is a machine learning algorithm that “constantly changes technology” to satisfy the user in new ways.
Instead of repeated mechanical movements, this “artificial intelligence mode” promises to reproduce the complex and unpredictable movements of a real, human blowjob. To do this, the company asked a team of six to review and annotate 109 hours of porn and hired machine learning specialists to create a model that processes this data and translates it into what the toy does. All the work took three years.
The result of the study was " Article about blowjob", a study (obviously not peer-reviewed), filled with sexual - or at least sex-related - algorithmic research:" In this paper we try to quantify the “general” or “typical” movements in oral sex performed on men - so begins the article. "To do this, we analyze a dataset containing more than 108 hours of pornographic video, each frame of which is annotated by the position of the lips on the penis trunk. We use the quantization technique to detect sixteen "of various movements, and using these movements, we develop and evaluate a system that procedurally generates realistic sequences of movements using deep learning. We quantify that this system is superior to simple methods based on Markov chains."

I asked Brian Sloan, the developer of Autoblow AI, about his attempt to hire serious scientists to work on the jerking machine. His suggestion was direct and devoid of hints:
“I told them that I was developing a sex toy for men that recreates the sensations of a blowjob and asked if they could use AI to study what really happens during a blowjob so that my device can do a blow job like a man, ”Sloan wrote to me in an email. “This was enough for seven companies to tell me almost immediately that“ this work is not for them. ” When I asked why, they did not want to answer. ”
The eighth team replied “yes,” and wrote an “Blowjob Article,” for which, according to Sloan, she received $ 30,000. But despite the excellent calculations and data collection methods, this study obviously lacks one thing - the names of the authors. There are no names in the article, no research groups or institutions responsible for the work are mentioned. Scientists performed the work anonymously, as they believed that other clients could refuse to cooperate with them if this work became known.
Sloan connected me to one of these anonymous scientists using a special email address so as not to disclose their data. I also looked at the correspondence between Sloan and the scientists, documenting the progress of the article, where the names of the scientists were edited.
"Brian found me on social networks ... probably on Linkedin," the scientist answered me under an anonymous address. “Our initial discussions were not about sex toys and pornography. They were technical, about video analysis and artificial intelligence. He was quite frank in the fact that several teams refused to work on such a project. I did not see any problems in this. ”
The scientist who wrote the letter mentioned that he has a “PhD degree in AI” and more than 30 publications and patents. The rest of the team is mostly engineers, he said.
The “Blowjob Article” begins with several charts and graphs that describe how researchers quantified movements derived from oral sex videos and converted them to various movements suggested by Autoblow. Among them are cluster diagrams representing various actions, including pauses, orgasm control, head game and “deep throat”.
Researchers have developed a dense neural network (DNN) architecture that predicts the next blower movement based on an analysis of previous movements, much like predictive text input works on your phone. The article describes the process of creating these models like this:

To collect this data, Sloan used the help of Dalibor Copic from Serbia. Kopić works for Sloan’s Very Intelligent E-Commerce Inc., a marketing company that has conducted other adult research, including World's Most Beautiful Vagina competition and Balls Contest . Very Intelligent E-Commerce Inc. very successfully covered Sloan’s crowdfunding campaigns for other adult products in the press , mentioning various “scientific” tricks for this. Before the “Blowjob Article”, the same team wrote an “ Article on the vulva ” for the “Autoblow Vagina Beauty Contest”.
Kopić put together a team of six to extract blowjob data from porn movies. They were not experts in statistics or machine learning, just friends and proxies who wanted to help with an absurd task. They created a system for annotating 109 hours of blowjob videos - a total of 1,200 videos with oral sex - using an animated hand-drawn head on a scroll bar, the position of which could be changed with the mouse while watching porn videos. Kopić informed me in an email that the head was called Sliderman.

“When oral sex begins and the girl does what she does, we move Sliderman to repeat oral sex, and so we reproduce oral sex in our system,” Kopich wrote to me. They watched the video at half speed, and received values from the scroll bar to collect the necessary data.
I asked Kopich if he considered this work boring. “To be honest, I was lucky and not lucky :)” he said: “Several clips at the beginning of the project were interesting ... closer to the end, it was probably a little hard to watch. So much oral sex ... "
“Actually, this is a rather interesting task,” said anonymous scientists who wrote the “Blowjob Article”: “Machine learning is now experiencing its gold rush, and developers can choose which projects to do. My criterion for choosing a job is to find projects that are interesting and that pay well. This project satisfies both conditions. ”
“If they so openly wanted to work on blowjob automation with AI, why remain anonymous?” I asked. They answered me that they had contacted some of their clients and asked if participation in this work and public association with it would be a problem.
“The answer was amazing,” the scientists said: “Corporations do not want any connection with such things. This is unacceptable to them, and they see it as a PR nightmare. Therefore, I remained anonymous. On a personal level, I did not see disagreement, but at the corporate level this is considered a problem. To understand the context, we work a lot with financial and government organizations. We got a ban from them. ”
No wonder. Hostility to sexual content is shown by both payment systems and lawmakers .
In addition to mathematics, this is an accessible and understandable example of how AI integrates into everyday products, such as email completion and Google search. They study our past experience, and in theory Autoblow AI is no different. He just learns from pornography.
Anonymous scientists also told me that the project was not fruitless for them. “I realized that convolutional neural networks are very flexible, and the fact that AI can understand such a high-level idea as blowjob is somewhat surprising. “I feel that we are really using the most advanced technology, using libraries that did not exist six months ago.”
Autoblow AI owes its existence to mathematics along with sweat, tears and the potential carpal tunnel syndrome of many people. But in the end, despite all the statistics and machine learning, it's just a plastic can with a silicone sleeve, moving up and down the penis. Researchers imagine a world where interactive pornography and sex toys (and non-sexual entertainment too) can be improved with AI - but this will not happen all at once.
“Sex toys are available everywhere in developed countries. Obviously, people want these things, and they will become smarter as scientists and engineers like me do their job, ”they told me,“ This is the big picture. There are, of course, purely technical improvements to the solution that we built for this particular sex toy, for example, the best procedural generation of a simulated blowjob, and other things besides blowjob. We found, for example, that anal sex is also recognized in this way. ”
Anonymous machine learning experts wrote a “blowjob article” to make this suction machine more realistic.
Autoblow AI, a sex toy for users with a penis, consists of a rubber sleeve and an electric motor located inside the body, and tries to imitate oral sex. Her Indiegogo campaign was launched last week and quickly reached its $ 50,000 goal. Its main advantage over the previous model, Autoblow 2, released in 2014, is a machine learning algorithm that “constantly changes technology” to satisfy the user in new ways.
Instead of repeated mechanical movements, this “artificial intelligence mode” promises to reproduce the complex and unpredictable movements of a real, human blowjob. To do this, the company asked a team of six to review and annotate 109 hours of porn and hired machine learning specialists to create a model that processes this data and translates it into what the toy does. All the work took three years.
The result of the study was " Article about blowjob", a study (obviously not peer-reviewed), filled with sexual - or at least sex-related - algorithmic research:" In this paper we try to quantify the “general” or “typical” movements in oral sex performed on men - so begins the article. "To do this, we analyze a dataset containing more than 108 hours of pornographic video, each frame of which is annotated by the position of the lips on the penis trunk. We use the quantization technique to detect sixteen "of various movements, and using these movements, we develop and evaluate a system that procedurally generates realistic sequences of movements using deep learning. We quantify that this system is superior to simple methods based on Markov chains."

I had no problems with this
I asked Brian Sloan, the developer of Autoblow AI, about his attempt to hire serious scientists to work on the jerking machine. His suggestion was direct and devoid of hints:
“I told them that I was developing a sex toy for men that recreates the sensations of a blowjob and asked if they could use AI to study what really happens during a blowjob so that my device can do a blow job like a man, ”Sloan wrote to me in an email. “This was enough for seven companies to tell me almost immediately that“ this work is not for them. ” When I asked why, they did not want to answer. ”
The eighth team replied “yes,” and wrote an “Blowjob Article,” for which, according to Sloan, she received $ 30,000. But despite the excellent calculations and data collection methods, this study obviously lacks one thing - the names of the authors. There are no names in the article, no research groups or institutions responsible for the work are mentioned. Scientists performed the work anonymously, as they believed that other clients could refuse to cooperate with them if this work became known.
Sloan connected me to one of these anonymous scientists using a special email address so as not to disclose their data. I also looked at the correspondence between Sloan and the scientists, documenting the progress of the article, where the names of the scientists were edited.
"Brian found me on social networks ... probably on Linkedin," the scientist answered me under an anonymous address. “Our initial discussions were not about sex toys and pornography. They were technical, about video analysis and artificial intelligence. He was quite frank in the fact that several teams refused to work on such a project. I did not see any problems in this. ”
The scientist who wrote the letter mentioned that he has a “PhD degree in AI” and more than 30 publications and patents. The rest of the team is mostly engineers, he said.
Meet Sliderman
The “Blowjob Article” begins with several charts and graphs that describe how researchers quantified movements derived from oral sex videos and converted them to various movements suggested by Autoblow. Among them are cluster diagrams representing various actions, including pauses, orgasm control, head game and “deep throat”.
Researchers have developed a dense neural network (DNN) architecture that predicts the next blower movement based on an analysis of previous movements, much like predictive text input works on your phone. The article describes the process of creating these models like this:

To collect this data, Sloan used the help of Dalibor Copic from Serbia. Kopić works for Sloan’s Very Intelligent E-Commerce Inc., a marketing company that has conducted other adult research, including World's Most Beautiful Vagina competition and Balls Contest . Very Intelligent E-Commerce Inc. very successfully covered Sloan’s crowdfunding campaigns for other adult products in the press , mentioning various “scientific” tricks for this. Before the “Blowjob Article”, the same team wrote an “ Article on the vulva ” for the “Autoblow Vagina Beauty Contest”.
Kopić put together a team of six to extract blowjob data from porn movies. They were not experts in statistics or machine learning, just friends and proxies who wanted to help with an absurd task. They created a system for annotating 109 hours of blowjob videos - a total of 1,200 videos with oral sex - using an animated hand-drawn head on a scroll bar, the position of which could be changed with the mouse while watching porn videos. Kopić informed me in an email that the head was called Sliderman.

“When oral sex begins and the girl does what she does, we move Sliderman to repeat oral sex, and so we reproduce oral sex in our system,” Kopich wrote to me. They watched the video at half speed, and received values from the scroll bar to collect the necessary data.
I asked Kopich if he considered this work boring. “To be honest, I was lucky and not lucky :)” he said: “Several clips at the beginning of the project were interesting ... closer to the end, it was probably a little hard to watch. So much oral sex ... "
Hi-tech
“Actually, this is a rather interesting task,” said anonymous scientists who wrote the “Blowjob Article”: “Machine learning is now experiencing its gold rush, and developers can choose which projects to do. My criterion for choosing a job is to find projects that are interesting and that pay well. This project satisfies both conditions. ”
“If they so openly wanted to work on blowjob automation with AI, why remain anonymous?” I asked. They answered me that they had contacted some of their clients and asked if participation in this work and public association with it would be a problem.
“The answer was amazing,” the scientists said: “Corporations do not want any connection with such things. This is unacceptable to them, and they see it as a PR nightmare. Therefore, I remained anonymous. On a personal level, I did not see disagreement, but at the corporate level this is considered a problem. To understand the context, we work a lot with financial and government organizations. We got a ban from them. ”
No wonder. Hostility to sexual content is shown by both payment systems and lawmakers .
In addition to mathematics, this is an accessible and understandable example of how AI integrates into everyday products, such as email completion and Google search. They study our past experience, and in theory Autoblow AI is no different. He just learns from pornography.
Anonymous scientists also told me that the project was not fruitless for them. “I realized that convolutional neural networks are very flexible, and the fact that AI can understand such a high-level idea as blowjob is somewhat surprising. “I feel that we are really using the most advanced technology, using libraries that did not exist six months ago.”
Autoblow AI owes its existence to mathematics along with sweat, tears and the potential carpal tunnel syndrome of many people. But in the end, despite all the statistics and machine learning, it's just a plastic can with a silicone sleeve, moving up and down the penis. Researchers imagine a world where interactive pornography and sex toys (and non-sexual entertainment too) can be improved with AI - but this will not happen all at once.
“Sex toys are available everywhere in developed countries. Obviously, people want these things, and they will become smarter as scientists and engineers like me do their job, ”they told me,“ This is the big picture. There are, of course, purely technical improvements to the solution that we built for this particular sex toy, for example, the best procedural generation of a simulated blowjob, and other things besides blowjob. We found, for example, that anal sex is also recognized in this way. ”