The Autoblow AI, a sex toy made for penis-possessing individuals, consists of a rubbery sleeve and a motor housed inside a canister that aims to simulate oral sex. It launched its Indiegogo campaign last week and quickly hit its goal of $50,000. Its biggest advertised advantage over the original model from 2014, the Autoblow 2, is a machine learning algorithm that "continually changes technique" in order to pleasure the user in new and exciting ways.

Instead of repetitive, mechanical motions, this "AI mode" promises to replicate the nuanced and unpredictable motions of a real, human blowjob. In order to do this, the company asked a team of six people to watch and annotate 109 hours of porn and hired machine learning engineers to create a model to take all that data and translate it into what the toy does. This entire process took three years.

The result of this research is the Blowjob Paper, a (definitely not peer-reviewed) study that's full of sexy—or at least, sexually-themed—algorithmic research: "In this work, we seek to quantify the 'common' or 'typical' movements involved in oral sex performed on males," the paper begins. " To do so, we analyze a dataset containing over 108 hours of pornographic video, annotated at each frame with the position of the lips along the shaft of the penis. We use quantization techniques to discover sixteen distinct motions, and using these motions we design and evaluate a system that procedurally generates realistic movement sequences using deep learning. We quantitatively show that this system is superior to simple Markov Chain techniques."