The AI companion startup says the campaign is about product feedback and sparking a conversation about digital sexual wellness
An AI startup is paying people to masturbate, and it is not shy about it.
Joi AI is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” at $2,000 for a month to test a feature called Daily Guided Masturbation and document its effects on stress, sleep, mood, and confidence. The four-week role is open to adults aged 18 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The listing describes ideal candidates as “articulate, observant, and impossible to blush,” people who can describe sensations “better than a sommelier describes a wine.” The posting also promises flexible scheduling and “the most interesting ‘What do you do for a living?’ answer at any party.”
Testers will complete guided sessions on a regular basis, fill out written questionnaires, and submit direct feedback to Joi AI. The company expects testers to evaluate whether the voice matched the chosen mood and to report on overall immersion and any technical issues.
More Read
A Company on the Rise and in Rebrand
Joi AI offers AI-generated avatars, voice interactions, and personalized chat focused on companionship and intimacy. The company rebranded from EVA AI in April 2025 and reports more than one million monthly active users, operating primarily through its website rather than through major app stores.
The rebrand coincided with what the company described as its first Dating Stress Awareness Day campaign. “Joi AI is focused on making AI companionship more immersive, personalized, and emotionally responsive,” said Julie Levin, head of brand and communications at the company. “We’re innovating features like Daily Guided Masturbation to make AI a more intuitive part of people’s everyday wellness routines, not just a novelty experience.”
More Read
Levin noted the posting has drawn strong interest and that the campaign aims to gather product feedback and spur conversation about AI and sexual wellness.
The Broader Surge in Digital Intimacy Platforms
The campaign lands amid a broader surge in AI companion use across the United States and growing scrutiny around its effects on real-world relationships.
A recent report from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies found that among dating, engaged, and married young adults who regularly used AI romantic companions, nearly 3 in 10 said their real-life partner did not know about their use of the platforms.
Between 2022 and mid-2025, the number of AI companion apps surged by 700%, according to technology news site TechCrunch. In 2026, they are poised to become even more embedded in social life.
Psychologists have raised concerns that AI companions, always validating and never argumentative, create unrealistic expectations that human relationships cannot match.
More Read
Legal Scrutiny and Ethical Questions
AI companion platforms have also faced legal scrutiny, including lawsuits alleging psychological harm to minors and complaints that chatbots misrepresented themselves as human.
Critics also point to data privacy concerns around intimate interactions recorded by AI platforms and the potential for dependency. Medical professionals have suggested that constant availability of an AI companion may contribute toward orgasmic dysfunction in real-life sexual encounters, since the consistency of a built-to-order AI companion makes it difficult to predict how users would respond to a human partner with unique traits and opinions.
For Joi AI, the masturbation consultant campaign appears to be as much a marketing move as a research exercise. It is a deliberately headline-grabbing way to position the company at the frontier of AI-driven sexual wellness, a space that is growing quickly even as it remains socially and legally contested.
Whether the campaign succeeds in generating meaningful product data or simply generates buzz, it reflects just how far artificial intelligence has moved beyond the workplace and into the most private corners of everyday life.
