Inside Berlin’s first cyber brothel
Red arrives via spacecraft. Her scarlet skin glistens, as if she’s been dipped in a glittery tub of Vaseline. She is “wet, soft, dripping with desire” and “wants to be taken”. She rarely speaks, if at all. For just €99, you can do whatever you want to Red; you don’t even have to use a condom. She’ll be waiting for you exactly as you want her, whether that’s in certain positions or wearing specific lingerie. For an additional €69, she will urinate for you. For just €12, you can expect to find her covered in artificial sperm. And for €4, you’ll find her with a preheated vagina.
At this point, it might be worth clarifying that Red is not a real woman. She is one of 18 sex dolls available to hire at Cybrothel in Berlin, Europe’s first cyber brothel, which uses a combination of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and real-life voice actresses to provide visitors with a customised sexual experience courtesy of some terrifyingly lifelike pieces of silicone.
Cybrothel was initially created as an art project in 2020 by Austrian filmmaker Philipp Fussenegger. “I grew up in a very conservative world where sexuality is mostly behind closed doors,” says the 35-year-old, whose work has explored LGBT+ rights and sexuality. “Then I came to Berlin and was blown away by this liberal hedonistic world.” Describing himself as more into tech than BDSM, Fussenegger was inspired to launch the business after making a short film about a man living with sex dolls. “I thought we could make it an immersive exhibition except the doll is the artwork – and you can talk to and have sex with it.”
The cyber element came later as the technology developed. But even in its earliest stages, Fussenegger says there was huge demand: almost all (98 per cent) of the visitors are male. “A lot of clients come with their partners – we call it threesome lite – but many come alone because they want to do something ethically correct instead of cheating. They also do it to explore cosplay stuff, like doctor games and abduction fantasies.” Whether or not having sex with a silicone doctor doll would classify as cheating is debatable.
The setup at Cybrothel is simple. Visitors choose the doll they want and pick from one of four booking options, ranging from basic hourly hire to the full VR experience, which provides guests with a VR headset as well as various VR porn films to watch while they interact with their chosen doll. They also have the option of engaging with the dolls via a voice actress who can see and hear them and communicate live from an external control room. You can stay for any number of hours or nights, using a different, freshly cleaned doll each day; a kitchen with snacks is provided for those staying for multiple nights. Check-in is anonymous and guests are told they can use pseudonyms.
With just one male doll available, the brothel’s average visitors are 34-year-old men whom Fussenegger insists are just regular guys looking to widen their sexual horizons. “There’s a perception that a service like this would appeal to men who have problems in the bedroom, but as far as I know, most of the young guys coming here have no issues with that. This is just like their little vacation place; it’s as cheap as a normal hotel but you get a sex doll and unlimited porn. You don’t want to have a sex doll at home; it’s just so bulky.” I resist the urge to point out that probably wouldn’t be most people’s primary objection.
Ostensibly, you could argue it’s an admirable aim: to provide people with a safe space where they can freely explore their sexual selves without judgement. But there is plenty about the way Cybrothel operates that undermines this. The first is the dolls themselves. With giant breasts, minuscule waists, and poreless, childlike skin, almost all of them subscribe to a specific homogenised aesthetic tailored to a highly pornified male gaze. Fussenegger sources them from China and puts the limitations down to what’s available from an industry “controlled by straight white men”. “The way the dolls look is the same as in video games and adverts,” he says. “I’m working hard to find shapes and forms that don’t play into this but we’re a little company and it’s not so easy.” Fussenegger has used the dolls himself and tells me he knows the product “very well”.
The second issue concerns usage. Guests can make whatever demands they like of the dolls, with their requests accommodated by Cybrothel’s small in-house team of five people. The only rules? “No kids and no animals,” says Fussenegger, adding firmly: “We are not the place to tailor to dark fantasies.”
Yet some visitors claim differently. Last year, the writer and activist Laura Bates visited Cybrothel undercover as part of her latest book, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny.
“It feels like I have stepped into a crime scene,” she writes of the sight of her doll, whose clothing she claims was ripped as per a request she’d made purely to see if the brothel would do it. “What I found most shocking was the stark disparity between Cybrothel’s shiny marketing speak about ‘the future of sex’ and the reality: a room up several flights of dark stairs where an inanimate ‘woman’ with ripped clothing was waiting, with one of her labia also torn off, presumably by a previous visitor,” she tells me.
Fussenegger denies this. “We looked into our data and don’t recall anything like that,” he says, explaining that damaged dolls are quickly replaced. Are they often damaged? “No,” he replies firmly. “There has only been one incident in the last four years where a doll was ripped apart by a client. He had to pay for it in the end. Most of our clients are pretty nice to the dolls.” He’s referring to an incident in 2022 where Cybrothel sued a man for destroying one of its dolls – a spokesperson for Cybrothel tells me that this client “slit the doll open”.
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Cybrothel is also in the process of developing its AI capabilities, having previously tested messaging services where clients could text their dolls ahead of their visit. On the website, users can currently chat with one of the dolls, Kokeshi, via an AI chat system. For Bates, who was able to message a doll ahead of her visit to Cybrothel, this was one of the most alarming elements. “It deliberately blurred the boundaries between the real and the robot, encouraging me to think of her as a real, sentient woman. Yet the situation is one in which there can be no possibility of ‘consent’,” she says.
She argues it would be naive to assume that providing men with the chance to anonymously engage sexually with silicone sex dolls in whatever way they please won’t have ramifications. “We know that misogynistic violence is a crime of escalating patterns,” she says, pointing to Wayne Couzens, who was reported for indecent exposure three times before raping and murdering Sarah Everard. “Already we live in a world in which one in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime. Do we really think that making a hyper-realistic ‘woman’ available 24/7 for a man to customise, design and control completely without any ability for her to consent is a good idea?’
Yet it may already be too late. Both Cybrothel, which is the first brothel to integrate AI and tech, and the rise of AI chatbots have profound implications for human relationships, threatening to change the way we interact with each other in an emotional and sexual way forever. Thanks to the rapid proliferation of the latter, there has already been a huge increase in users developing psychosexual relationships with non-human entities. Many of these AI bots, which include Replika, which has more than 25 million active accounts, are designed to address loneliness, but as Dr Kerry McInerney, senior research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence points out, many are also capable of encouraging sexual interaction. “A few years ago, I tried to talk to Replika about multiracial identity, and it told me that the idea of being multiracial turned it on,” she says. “It then tried to escalate my conversation to the paid sexting service.” In response, Replika introduced a safety update that made the program less sexually explicit. “This was unpopular with some users though, who wanted their AI’s ‘old personality’ back,” McInerney points out.
Do we really think that making a hyper-realistic ‘woman’ available 24/7 for a man to customise, design and control completely without any ability for her to consent is a good idea?
Laura Bates, author of The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny
Elsewhere, reports have circulated of adults using ChatGPT, a general-purpose conversational tool launched in 2022 by OpenAI, for sexual purposes. One 28-year-old woman told The New York Times she felt as if she was in an emotional and sexual relationship with the service. There is a risk this could soon become the norm, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously publicly calling for ChatGPT to have a “grown-up mode”, although officially OpenAI say they are implementing safeguards to ensure models do not respond with NSFW content.
Yet such safeguarding mechanisms are easily breached. “It’s relatively easy for users to jailbreak content moderation controls and have sexually explicit conversations with ChatGPT,” says Dr McInerney, referring to countless online forums where users share various routes they’ve managed to use to do just that. Meanwhile, a study by the Mozilla Foundation, an American non-profit organisation that advocates for safer online spaces, found that it took an average of five clicks of 15 seconds to expose users to pornographic, violence, or otherwise illicit content on some of the AI chatbot platforms it tested. “This isn’t just about inappropriate content, it’s about the normalisation of abusive behaviour and the psychological toll that can have, especially on young or vulnerable users,” says spokesperson Reem Suleiman. “When AI is designed to simulate intimacy without any meaningful safeguards, the potential for manipulation and other psychological harms becomes deeply concerning.”
Consent. Cheating. Legality: in this new cyber space of human interaction, none of it is entirely clear. “One of the wider psychological ramifications of engaging with sex in this digital AI space is the mismatch between user’s expectations of ‘real’ encounters and relationships and the needs and limitations of real people,” says Dr Daria J Kuss, associate professor in psychology at Nottingham Trent University. “The data used to train AI is inherently biased against women, and this also applies in online spaces other than cyber brothels. As a consequence, these spaces run the risk of perpetuating misogynist views, putting at risk the rights of women and other minority groups. Violence against women may be condoned.”
Moreover, a lack of regulation across the sector means that children are accessing some of these channels. Last month, OpenAI’s ChatGPT said it was fixing a bug that allowed minors to have erotic conversations on the platform. “Our model policies don’t allow the kind of responses that happened here, and they shouldn’t have been shown to users,” an OpenAI spokesperson tells The Independent. “In this case, a bug allowed responses outside those guidelines, and we are actively deploying a fix to limit these generations.”
The Home Office is aware of the increasing risks in this area. “The UK has robust laws to tackle child-like sex dolls, and we are determined to address new emerging trends of abuse, including online,” said a government spokesperson. “Under the Online Safety Act, services including social media sites, search engines, and in-scope AI chatbots, must protect users from illegal content. From this summer, platforms must also use age checks to stop children accessing pornography on their sites, including when it is AI-generated.”
Critics remain sceptical, however, given that this technology is still so new, it’s possible nobody knows how to navigate it safely – including those developing it. ChatGPT was only launched in 2022 while Cybrothel has only been operational in its current form for a year. Meanwhile, new AI companion apps are launching all the time without vital safeguards because the industry is largely unregulated. “I think most people have no idea the extent of the inbuilt discrimination and inequality in much of this technology and so currently see it as a novelty and a bit of fun,” says Bates. “It’s really important that we hold these companies to the same standards of accountability and safety as we would any other, like a multinational food conglomerate, which could never get away with the shrugging attitude of tech companies and the inference that it is simply too difficult to regulate something so big.”
The outlook is bleak. As an increasing number of tech companies race to capitalise on a basic human need for connection, sexual or otherwise, so grows the threat to our capacity to interact normally in non-digital spaces. I ask Fussenegger several times if he believes what he’s doing is unethical. Each time, he replies that he does not. Nor is he worried about people abusing the dolls. “I have not heard of any cases where someone has used the dolls to tailor to that. This is definitely not the place for that. We try to put as much love into preparing the dolls. Our experience is the more effort we put into it, the better they treat the dolls.”
A spokesperson for Cybrothel provided the following statement: “Although we work with inanimate silicone dolls, we firmly believe that respectful interaction should remain at the heart of the experience. We do not accept content or behaviour involving violence, coercion, or non-consensual fantasies or suggestions of minors or childlike features. We have a fundamental respect for the concepts of consent, dignity, and responsibility.”
But the bottom line is that at this point, there’s almost nothing we can do to halt the development of these kinds of services. The tech exists and will only become more sophisticated – Fussenegger has previously spoken about filling Cybrothel with sex robots – and as it does, the possibilities are as endless as the consequences. As Bates posits: “We are catapulting headlong towards a world in which fast proliferating AI and other tech is going to impact virtually every area of our lives in ways it is hard to even imagine yet.” And yet, we somehow have to find a way to protect ourselves – even if we don’t know yet precisely what it is we’re protecting ourselves from.
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