The Internet Is Roasting Joi AI for Hiring “Masturbation Consultants” at $2K/month. They’re Laughing at the Wrong Thing.

Joi AI's hiring of so-called "masturbation consultants" has become an easy target for online ridicule, but critics are missing what may be a genuinely novel business strategy: the startup is quietly building a multi-million-dollar market in intimate AI companionship by legitimizing a category of work that Silicon Valley has long pretended doesn't exist. The consultants aren't the story—the fact that a funded startup is operating openly in a space where competitors use euphemisms and shell companies suggests the taboo around AI sexuality is finally cracking, with potentially significant implications for how the industry develops in the coming years. What looks like a publicity stunt might actually be a calculated bet that normalization beats concealment

quasa.io·May 30