A “gooner” tells WIRED he became hooked on the cartoonish nature of AI porn. Several addictions experts say the genre could pose a problem for people prone to compulsive sexual behavior.

Kyle’s interest in AI porn began last summer as he circled rock bottom. From the outside, everything seemed fine. He was in a committed relationship with his longtime girlfriend. He enjoyed the perks of his job working for a sports betting company. Still, all he could think about was fueling his porn addiction in new ways—even at the cost of feeling mentally drained and tired. “Pretty much all I wanted to do was doomscroll on my phone and watch content. And I wasn’t able to stop even though I noticed that it was a problem. I became desensitized,” he says. “I was looking for that next dose of excitement.”

“It was something I had not seen before—and I had to see more.” —Kyle, a recovering porn addict

That’s when he came across the Instagram Reel showing an AI-generated image of a woman with “extremely large breasts the size of her body,” he says. He knew it was fake but also felt strangely seduced by it. “In the back of my mind, I was like, OK, I do find this kind of attractive,” he says. “It was something I had not seen before—and I had to see more.”

Kyle is a “gooner,” a term for someone who finds pleasure from prolonged sessions of intense masturbation. The 26-year-old, who asked to be identified by his first name citing privacy concerns, says that at the peak of his addiction he would force himself to masturbate “either out of habit, obligation or desire.” The Instagram Reel led him down a rabbit hole of dreamlike pleasure as he searched for AI porn that depicted “women with cartoonish boobs, aeriolas and nipples twice the size of the rest of her torso, [and] super wide hips.”

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