Italian study finds 8.7% of young adults have sexted with AI

How common is sexting with a chatbot? An Italian research team has some early numbers. In an anonymous online survey of 378 young adults aged 18 to 35, 33 people, about 8.7 percent, said they had exchanged sexual messages with an AI. Of that group, 75.8 percent were men. By sexual orientation they split almost evenly between people who identified as exclusively heterosexual and people who did not.

The paper, “Sexting with AI: Emerging Questions and Preliminary Evidence from Italy,” is by Alessandra Ragona, Antonio Chirumbolo, L. Ruggeri, Elena Cattelino and Mara Morelli. It comes from Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Valle d’Aosta and appeared in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Sapienza announced it in a press release, and ANSA covered it on October 29.

Exploratory correlations linked AI sexting to sexual sensation seeking and to problematic online porn use, measured with the Italian versions of standard scales. Correlation is all it is. The authors call their findings preliminary and say the phenomenon needs more work “to avoid simplistic or pathologising interpretations.”

That caution matters. This is a short, preliminary contribution, not a large representative survey. Thirty-three people cannot tell us what AI sexters as a whole are like, and an online convenience sample of one country’s young adults has clear limits. What the study does provide is a baseline outside the English-speaking world, where most intimate AI products are built.

For anyone who thinks of chatbot sexting as a strange fringe habit, the more interesting figure may be the simplest one: nearly one in eleven respondents had already tried it.