This is a transcript of Michelle Kelly’s talk at the ‘Porn tech: From ‘sex’ robots to AI girlfriends. What is the social impact?’ event on Saturday 28 February 2026.
Hello. I’m Michelle Kelly from Warwickshire in the UK. I’m a writer, a teacher, and a mother of three. I am also, unfortunately, a survivor of trafficking and the sex trade.
Today I want to talk about my experience, and why it matters to the conversation we are having.
When I was nineteen years old, I was trafficked into what was presented to me as a high-class escort agency. In reality, it was a pimping and trafficking ring operating behind a legal front.
In the UK, escort agencies are legal. While pimping and third-party profiteering from prostitution are technically illegal, the law is easily bypassed. Agencies simply avoid explicitly advertising “sex for money.” Instead, they promote “paid dating,” “sugar arrangements,” or “paid companionship.” The sexual transaction, they say, is entirely up to the individuals involved.
That legal grey area provides perfect cover for exploitation carried out through force, fraud and coercion.
I was first introduced to the ring by a so-called friend. Her boyfriend was one of the pimps. At the same time, the agency advertised openly in newspapers and later online as a legitimate escort service.
I was told the familiar lie: that this was paid dating. That I didn’t have to do anything sexual. That I could simply go on dates and be paid for my time.
That was not what happened.
On the day I went for my “trial,” I was raped. I was then driven to a hotel to meet the first buyer.
I did not have the freedom to leave.
At the time, I was homeless. I was fleeing domestic violence. The people running the ring knew this. They used it. There were physical threats made, including threats towards my family. I was told there was no point going to the police because the agency was legal, and I had attended the initial interview of my own accord.
Eventually, the only way I could escape was by returning to the previous abusive relationship I had fled. It felt like the only place where I might have some form of protection.
For years, I did not realise that what had happened to me legally constituted trafficking. I knew I had been raped. I knew I had been exploited. But the shame and stigma attached to prostitution silenced me. On the surface, the agency presented itself as “high class.” Large sums of money changed hands (though I saw very little of it.) It was sold as something glamorous. Discreet. Sophisticated.
It was none of those things.
We often hear about grooming gangs in the media and think of them as entirely separate from what is sometimes called “high-class” prostitution or escorting. In my experience, that separation is false.
Some of the drivers in the ring I was trafficked into later appeared on the front page of a national newspaper after being prosecuted for grooming gang offences. I was probably one of the oldest women there. Many of the others looked seventeen or eighteen and may well have been younger. We were forbidden from speaking to one another while being transported to hotels, so I do not know their stories.
I remember one girl who looked no older than eighteen. She was heavily pregnant — by one of the drivers — and was still being pimped out.
Whatever distinctions we like to make, this was organised sexual exploitation.
Nearly all of the buyers were white. Sexual exploitation is not confined to any one community or ethnicity. It is a pattern of male violence against women that cuts across class, race, and geography. We must be honest about that if we want to address it.
What I want to focus on now is something called the “girlfriend experience.”
This is often marketed as a more intimate, more respectful form of prostitution. As I understand Professor Richardson will explain, it is also the model for what we now see emerging in the form of AI “girlfriends.”
The girlfriend experience is sold as paid companionship; not just sex, but conversation, affection, the simulation of a relationship.
In reality, what it usually means is this: a longer booking in which the buyer expects not only sexual access to your body, but access to your emotional labour.
You are expected to smile. To pretend you enjoy it. To kiss, to cuddle, to massage, to feign affection. Afterwards, you may be expected to sit and listen sympathetically while he complains that his wife does not understand him.
What is being bought is not simply sex. What is being bought is the fantasy that he is the centre of the universe, that his needs are paramount, and that the woman exists solely to be delighted to fulfil them.
It is not a real girlfriend experience. A real relationship involves boundaries, bad days, mutual needs, the ability to say no.
In the so-called girlfriend experience, you are not allowed to say no. You are not allowed to have needs. You are performing constant emotional compliance.
When buyers become “regulars,” the risk can actually increase. Regulars can become possessive. They can become stalkers. And we know that men are often at their most sexually violent when they feel rejected.
I personally know of many situations in which regular buyers became extremely violent and dangerous.
In my experience, the man with the bruised ego is often the most dangerous of all.
Even when there is no overt physical assault beyond the rape inherent in prostitution, the emotional exhaustion is immense. Survival depends on dissociation and on fawning, the trauma response where you appease in order to stay safe.
In a sense, the girlfriend experience is predicated on fawning.
And trauma responses have long-term consequences for mental, emotional and physical health.
Yet this is what women in prostitution are expected to do every single day, whether they are overtly trafficked, as I was, or whether poverty or other vulnerabilities have pushed them there. The requirement to dissociate. To fawn. To endure extreme risk of violence. That remains constant.
Something struck me very clearly in hindsight.
I had an abusive childhood. I had an abusive boyfriend. The exact same survival strategies I used in those situations – appeasement, emotional compliance, hypervigilance – were the ones I used with buyers.
Abuse is the training ground for prostitution and pornography.
And as Professor Richardson will explain, it has now become the training ground for what we call porn robots and AI girlfriends.
AI is not created in a vacuum. It is trained on existing material. It is modelled on pornography and prostitution.
Abused women are, in effect, the template for the so-called sex doll.
When I first heard about porn robots, I admit my initial thought was: if this stops men using women in the sex trade, perhaps that is a positive development.
But research does not bear that out. These technologies tend to desensitise, not deter. And what I have heard from women who have more recently exited — or are still trapped within — the sex trade is that these developments are already affecting them directly.
In some countries with legal brothels, buyers are now offered sessions with both prostituted women and porn dolls. Women are being forced into direct competition with inanimate objects that cannot feel pain, cannot say no, cannot be harmed.
Imagine what that means.
Imagine what behaviours that encourages.
For every new so-called innovation in prostitution and pornography whether it be camming, subscription platforms or AI, the first people to bear the cost are women in the sex trade and trafficked women.
It is difficult, because this subject can feel dystopian. I am genuinely frightened about where this trajectory leads, and what it means for all women.
But hope lies here, in the fact that we are talking about it. That researchers like Professor Richardson are raising awareness. That survivors are being listened to.
Please continue to amplify survivor voices. Please continue to listen to researchers. Please speak about this — including to men. Challenge the narratives. Refuse the sanitised language.
Women deserve better.
Human beings deserve better.
Thank you.