Gabriel. Mid 30s. Muscular. Bisexual. In wrestling, praise and bodily fluids. No, I’m not writing a dating app resume. Instead, I create a protagonist for an AI love story generator that has drawn almost 19 million stories since its launch in 2024: Beaten.
The sheer volume of stories reflects the ingenuity and ease of use of the platform. Name and gender your characters, write down the actions you want to see (oral sex, mutual massage, anal play, water sports, etc.) and briefly describe a scene the generator might bring up. Finally, you’ll choose first- or third-person narration, confirm you’re 18+, and in less than a minute, Smitten will have created a personalized love story for you to read privately, use as masturbation fodder, or share with a partner via a private link.
After I finish my own character description, I write one for my human who makes a regular appearance in my inner fantasy life. (He’s my boyfriend, I’m in love). Suddenly, I fall into a scene of an imaginary performance of my love spitting in the mouth of an imaginary with… Indeed, the generator understood the assignment.
I wasn’t surprised to find a love story that turned me on. My boyfriend and I are my favorite characters in my inner fantasy life, and I’ve been devouring romance novels since high school. What caught me off guard, however, was how quickly I was able to go from judging this kind of technology to understanding its appeal.
Sample story provided by Smitten.
Courtesy of Smitten
As a sex journalist, I’ve watched my workload steadily decrease with the rise of artificial intelligence technologies that produce, in seconds, the kinds of work I report and write about. And I have real concerns about that potential environmental impacts. So I was ready to go against Smitten.
However, it only took one Smitten story for me to understand its appeal – and its value – to the millions of pleasure-seekers who keep discovering it or returning to it. At best, it’s an antidote to the stress and exhaustion that hinders people’s sex lives.
In a 2025 overview38% of Americans identified fatigue as the biggest barrier to sex, ranking it above health issues, work stress, household responsibilities and even parenting demands. Meanwhile, a study in Annals of Behavioral Medicine reported that when people experienced higher levels of stress in their daily lives, they reported lower sexual desire and lower sexual arousal.
After trying it both on my own and with my partner, I think Smitten shines in this limited time, mounting anxiety and lingering desire.
For pleasure seekers who miss feeling sexually playful, adventurous or connected, but don’t have the time to read a 500-page romance novel or the bandwidth to dream up an elaborate roleplay scenario from scratch, the platform offers the shortcut of a personalized fantasy in less than a minute. Especially for people whose desire isn’t gone, but the time and mental bandwidth are, Smitten’s low barrier to entry is a huge boon.
Smitten’s greatest strength isn’t the prose. stories are not the literary masterpieces found in the current weird girl canon. Like most AI writing, it leans a bit on clichés and generalizations. When I created a character who was bisexual, for example, the generator automatically generated a three-person scene even though I hadn’t prompted it to generate group sex content. (Disclaimer: For future stories, I sidestepped this issue by explicitly writing “no threesomes” or “monogamous relationships”).
Rather, its power lies in the way it lowers the barriers to desire. Instead of having to go from scratch to the full fantasy world, Smitten allows users to start with something half-baked and incomplete and edit from there. With a premium subscription ($7.99 per month), users can even request changes to single sentences and full scenes that don’t resonate, while saving favorite characters and creating multi-chapter stories with recurring characters.
Courtesy of Smitten
“Erotica has long helped couples cultivate desire and talk about their fantasies,” said MD Jessica O’Reilly, Ph.D., host Sex with Dr. Jess podcastand its co-author The ultimate guide to seduction and foreplayhe says She Knows. The brain is one of our most powerful sexual organs, and erotica turns its wheels by allowing readers to co-create the experience and imagine themselves in ways that feel personally meaningful, she says.
When read with or to a partner, romance has the added benefit of supporting fantasy conversations. “Reading it together can spark conversations about fantasies, boundaries, and reversals in a way that often feels less vulnerable than trying to articulate those desires in the first place,” she says.
Dr. O’Reilly sees AI-generated romance as an extension of this idea. “An AI tool that creates a personalized love story based on your interests or fantasies can add another layer of innovation, sparking laughter, curiosity and conversations about desire, boundaries and fantasy,” he says.
Still, Smitten isn’t a cure-all. While the platform can make it easier to enter, engage, and access a fantasy, it can’t eliminate the stressors that get in the way of your sex life in the first place. If chronic stress, burnout, or exhaustion is interfering with your sex life, Dr. O’Reilly says the most effective interventions address these root causes—whether that’s improving work-life balance, going to therapy, assigning responsibilities, or otherwise making time to rest and reconnect.
The most unexpected part of testing Smitten, however, wasn’t the stories themselves, but the conversations my partner and I had afterward about if, when, and how AI fits into our relationship.
Using Smitten—as well as other AI-based sex and relationship tools such as Arya— raises a set of questions for couples about using AI in a relationship.
Certainly, “Artificial intelligence can be used to reduce the mental load associated with everyday life, helping with planning and scheduling to free up time that can be spent on relationships,” says Dr. O’Reilly. “It can also spark certain conversations, such as those about fantasies, and provide language when you struggle to find the right words.”
But if AI begins to replace every vulnerable conversation, love note or creative expression of affection, couples risk outsourcing the very skills that strengthen relationships over time, says Dr O’Reilly.
“From search engines and navigation apps to email, social media and online shopping, artificial intelligence is already built into many of our applications,” he says. “So it’s not a matter of whether we use it or not, but how to use it in ways that support, rather than detract from, our relationships.”
Personally, I found my partner and I about our ethics around AI to be just as relatable as reading about fictional versions of ourselves enjoying each other’s sweat, spit, and end.
When I first logged on to Smitten, I expected to leave in my underwear in a bunch about the latest ways AI is taking over something deeply human. Instead, I came away appreciating the personalization of the stories themselves, as well as the conversations the platform encouraged between me and my partner.
After all, Smitten wasn’t just facilitating a unique moment of heat between my boyfriend and me. It also started an ongoing conversation about the role of technology and artificial intelligence in our relationship more broadly—ultimately, giving us more than one entrance into increased intimacy.
