Meet The Defiant AI Sex Robot Starring In A New Action Thriller Comic

Real sex robots like the lifelike Harmony from Realdoll, built with AI contributions from Realbotix, can already make conversation, but they can’t yet tell when their owner’s in a sour mood. Lacy, however, can sense loneliness, sadness and hurt in humans.

“I can hear it in their voice whenever they tell me their life story. I can see it in their eyes,” Lacy says in the first part of the graphic novel, which comes out in paperback on November 1 for $3.99, with subsequent segments releasing consecutively on December 20, January 23 and February 21 for the same price.

Red Light appears as generative AI advances quickly and exponentially, and artists including Cho express both excitement about the creative possibilities the tools present and anxiety about the ethical and copyright considerations. There are other worries, as well. Cho cites the way AI reflects the biases of its human creators and can surface prejudices such as racism and sexism. Still, while movies like Mission: Impossible 7 focus on AI’s detriments, she wanted to show another side to the technology.

“What I really wanted to do was conceive an AI that’s programmed with the best of us, with goodness and kindness,” said Cho, whose other credits include working as a story editor for season 2 of Them on Amazon.

The graphic novel from New York-based entertainment studio AWA (Artists, Writers, Artisans) is set sometime between 50 and 100 years from now in a cyberpunk metropolis permeated by AI and surveillance drones. In part one, Brazilian artist Priscilla Petraites renders the brothel in a bruise-like palette of blacks and deep purples and blues. The brothel looks like a subterranean prison, and it clearly is one for the sex workers.

On the rare occasion Lacy makes it outside, she encounters a world bathed in brilliant yellows, pinks and greens. It’s a world she wants more of, a desire that’s amplified when she meets Natalie, an orphaned child at the brothel who desperately wants to break free.

In the hands of Petraites, who describes her work as gritty and raw, Lacy and her fellow humanoid workers could easily be mistaken for flesh-and-blood humans. Except, that is, when we get a glimpse at Lacy’s internal hinges as the brothel’s mechanic fixes her shoulder, which got dislocated during sex with a client (she has pain receptors, but “it doesn’t hurt too bad,” she says of the injury). Or when wires and green fluid shoot out of another brothel worker’s head after she suffers a violent reprisal for daring to try running away.

“The story has much of what I like to draw the most,” the artist said in an interview, such as “the dystopic and underground world filled with violence, love and lust, played by beautiful and bizarre characters.”

Cho calls herself an obsessive fan of comics and manga and takes inspiration from sci-fi franchises like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. She said she came up with the idea for a comic about an AI sex robot while pondering the extent to which sex drives technological innovation.

In addition to imagining AI and robots of the future, Cho wanted to destigmatize sex, especially for women. Lacy helps do that, Cho believes, as seeing her in sexually explicit situations doesn’t detract viewers from seeing her as a hero with powerful emotional and intellectual capabilities.

“Sexuality is a core part of her life, but it is not all that she is,” Cho said. “And I think that’s an accurate representation of how women really are and how society should view us. A lot of us have sex, some of us have a lot of sex, but that doesn’t mean we’re not smart, strong and talented.”

For more information on Red Light and other content, visit AWA Studios on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and AWAStudios.com.