I remember a story—or rather, a real-life incident—narrated by Osho Rajneesh in one of his talks.
Osho and a friend were once sitting on the banks of Varanasi when they noticed a topless woman with long hair and an beautiful booty, draped in a transparent white cloth, taking a holy dip in the Ganges. The only disappointment was that the person was facing away from them.
Osho, as he put it, was busy sublimating his sexual energy into spiritual awareness while observing the scene. His friend, however—a typical householder—experienced a surge of desire and could not stop talking about what he would like to do with the young woman he believed he was seeing.
Then came the revelation.
The person turned around, and it was a man with long hair and no breasts whatsoever.
What happened next?
In a fraction of a second, lust turned into disgust. But why?
The wet figure draped in the transparent white cloth had been exactly the same all along. What changed was not the object being observed, but the thoughts, perceptions, possibilities, and fantasies running through Osho’s friend’s mind. Once the assumed gender changed, the mind could no longer continue the fantasy. The chain of imagination was interrupted and abruptly arrested.
In many ways, this is how most men live today.
A large percentage of men experience their lust primarily in the realm of imagination. Civilization, social norms, laws, and consequences place limits on action, so desire often remains confined to the mind. Their inner world runs continuously, populated by fantasies involving people they meet, see, or interact with. Much of modern social order depends on people regulating these impulses rather than acting on them.
Recently, I watched a few AI-generated adult videos, and, to be honest, they were convincing. They functioned in much the same way as the man draped in the white cloth in Osho’s story. The mind knew the images were artificially generated, but then all pornography is ultimately just pixels lighting up a screen. What matters is not the physical reality of the image but the mental chain reaction it triggers. It is the imagination that creates pleasure, anticipation, and emotional involvement.
The growth of AI-generated adult content, though artificial, may help many men cope with their sexual impulses in the coming generations. Likewise, interactions with AI models, virtual companions, and AI-generated influencers may offer psychological outlets for desires and fantasies that most men will never fulfill in real life.
Whether one views this as healthy or unhealthy is another debate altogether. But from a purely psychological perspective, the mind often responds more to possibilities and imagination than to reality itself. AI merely provides a new canvas upon which those possibilities can be projected