Is It a Sin to Use AI Porn?
Published October 28, 2026
Over the past two decades, I have written a great deal about pornography. At many different times and in many different forms, I have urged people to consider a long list of arguments against it. I’m thankful to have interacted with many people who have come to see pornography as evil and who have committed themselves to sexual purity.
Some of the strongest and most effective arguments against using pornography are based upon the humanity of the people who are involved in it. So, for example, in “7 Good Reasons To Stop Looking at Porn Right Now,” I wrote that we need to consider the cost to those who make it. “Pornography exacts a high cost of those who create it—the cost to their bodies, to their souls, to their mental well-being, to their dignity, to their future. A vast amount of the pornography you enjoy is created by people against their wills. The simple fact is, by watching porn, you are watching rape and deriving pleasure from it. You become a willing participant in sexual violence and you allow that actor on the screen to suffer for your pleasure.” Even if some pornography is consensual, a great deal of pornography is not, and the viewer cannot know which is which.
Similarly, in “8 Sins You Commit Whenever You Look at Porn,” I said that those who watch it are guilty of sexual assault. “A person who drives a getaway car for a band of bank robbers will rightly be charged with murder for anyone who is killed in committing that crime. The person who voluntarily watches sexual assault for purposes of titillation is rightly guilty of that sexual assault. And a nauseating quantity of pornography is violent in nature, displaying men taking advantage of women. Sometimes these women have volunteered for such degradation and sometimes they are forced or raped into it. To watch such horrifying smut is to be a participant in it and to bear the moral blemish of it.”
While these are far from the only arguments against pornography, I believe they are especially effective ones. But what happens when the characters involved in pornography are no longer people? What happens when they no longer exist at all, but are merely generated by AI? Could AI allow us to create “ethical pornography” that solves one of the foremost concerns that come with “real” pornography? In other words, is it a sin to look at AI-generated porn? (For our purposes, we will assume that we are already rejecting deepfake porn—using the likeness of an existing person—as morally repugnant and both immoral and illegal. Instead, we are considering images of people who are generated entirely by AI.)
The simple answer is yes: it is as sinful to look at AI-generated porn as it is to look at human-created porn. While some of the arguments may not be as relevant, the majority are unchanged. Before I explain how and why, I want you to listen to a warning: we are all experts at circumventing the spirit of the law by abiding within the strict letter of the law. There is something deep within us that wants to defy the rules that are given to us, and we become skilled at justifying the ways we do this. Often this involves reducing morality to a strict binary, then convincing ourselves that because we have not blatantly broken the law, we have abided by it. This was exactly the sin of the Pharisees of Jesus’s day who would strictly tithe the spices they grew in their gardens, yet fail to live according to the higher principles of justice, mercy, and faithfulness. There is something of the Pharisee in each one of us.
With that in mind, here are reasons why it is a sin to use pornography that has been generated by AI.
Some of the strongest and most effective arguments against using pornography are based upon the humanity of the people who are involved in it. So, for example, in “7 Good Reasons To Stop Looking at Porn Right Now,” I wrote that we need to consider the cost to those who make it. “Pornography exacts a high cost of those who create it—the cost to their bodies, to their souls, to their mental well-being, to their dignity, to their future. A vast amount of the pornography you enjoy is created by people against their wills. The simple fact is, by watching porn, you are watching rape and deriving pleasure from it. You become a willing participant in sexual violence and you allow that actor on the screen to suffer for your pleasure.” Even if some pornography is consensual, a great deal of pornography is not, and the viewer cannot know which is which.
Similarly, in “8 Sins You Commit Whenever You Look at Porn,” I said that those who watch it are guilty of sexual assault. “A person who drives a getaway car for a band of bank robbers will rightly be charged with murder for anyone who is killed in committing that crime. The person who voluntarily watches sexual assault for purposes of titillation is rightly guilty of that sexual assault. And a nauseating quantity of pornography is violent in nature, displaying men taking advantage of women. Sometimes these women have volunteered for such degradation and sometimes they are forced or raped into it. To watch such horrifying smut is to be a participant in it and to bear the moral blemish of it.”
While these are far from the only arguments against pornography, I believe they are especially effective ones. But what happens when the characters involved in pornography are no longer people? What happens when they no longer exist at all, but are merely generated by AI? Could AI allow us to create “ethical pornography” that solves one of the foremost concerns that come with “real” pornography? In other words, is it a sin to look at AI-generated porn? (For our purposes, we will assume that we are already rejecting deepfake porn—using the likeness of an existing person—as morally repugnant and both immoral and illegal. Instead, we are considering images of people who are generated entirely by AI.)
The simple answer is yes: it is as sinful to look at AI-generated porn as it is to look at human-created porn. While some of the arguments may not be as relevant, the majority are unchanged. Before I explain how and why, I want you to listen to a warning: we are all experts at circumventing the spirit of the law by abiding within the strict letter of the law. There is something deep within us that wants to defy the rules that are given to us, and we become skilled at justifying the ways we do this. Often this involves reducing morality to a strict binary, then convincing ourselves that because we have not blatantly broken the law, we have abided by it. This was exactly the sin of the Pharisees of Jesus’s day who would strictly tithe the spices they grew in their gardens, yet fail to live according to the higher principles of justice, mercy, and faithfulness. There is something of the Pharisee in each one of us.
With that in mind, here are reasons why it is a sin to use pornography that has been generated by AI.
