The New Escort Talks Back: Escorting in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, or: The Luxury of Being Inconvenient

The highest-earning escort I have ever met was, quite frankly, a tiny little bit of a brat. And I mean that affectionately.

The first time I met her, we were having dinner with one of her regular clients at a two-star Michelin restaurant in Venice. He was a Silicon Valley founder with just enough suspended Kanye energy to make the evening entertaining. I was happy and excited to join them both for a little terzetto. Yet before we even left their apartment, she disappeared into the bathroom for so long that we nearly missed our reservation.

Then, once we were finally seated, she teased her handsome nerd relentlessly, gently mocked him in front of me, and constantly drifted in and out of her phone. At the end of the night, after a dazzling number of courses, she waited until the restaurant's famous cheese trolley had disappeared before deciding she wanted fresh fruit instead. Blueberries, in particular. She mercilessly sent him back after it.

I looked at her in wonder and, in my mind, likened her to a cat bent on getting one last erratic twitch out of her prey mouse.

He fetched the fruit, ordered more champagne, accepted the teasing with remarkable grace, and then extended the booking for another ten days.

I remember sitting there, amused, thinking: This can't possibly be optimal customer service.

You see, before I ventured out on my own as an independent escort, I had assumed that the highest end of my industry would exclusively reward absolute perfection, in looks as well as character. If someone is paying extraordinary sums to spend time with a beautiful woman, I thought, surely the experience consists of impeccable manners, effortless charm, unwavering attentiveness, instant validation and the kind of emotional intelligence that smooths away every trace of friction.

My colleague, her shoes off under the table and her attention perpetually elsewhere, appeared to violate nearly every one of those assumptions.

And yet this wasn't merely an external observation. In the department of imperfections, I was boasting some questionable inventory too.

By the time of that dinner, I had just built a thriving independent escort practice of my own. I wasn't sending clients back for blueberries or deliberately making them late for dinner, but neither was I performing endless sweetness or compliance. I had (and still have) strong opinions, well-earned boundaries and little desire to pretend otherwise.

My communication could be patchy when enquiries piled up and, despite my rather glamorous appearance, I'd always been (arguably quite charmingly) clumsy, (arguably disarmingly) a little awkward, perpetually hungry, and considerably more hyper fixated and nerdy than expected.

So neither of us, in our own ways, were behaving quite as the imaginary customer service manual for our industry would have recommended. And yet we were both doing remarkably well. So instead of wondering why we succeeded despite our imperfections, I gradually found myself asking whether we succeeded because of them.

The Girlfriend Experience, Interrupted

When I first became an independent escort (the best choice I ever made), I noticed myself changing in ways I hadn't expected.

Agency work had taught me to think in the language of constant pleasing. The message was painfully clear: smooth over friction, avoid disagreement and prioritise the client's comfort above all else, often at the expense of your own. But independence pulled me in the opposite direction.

I became less interested in performing the perfect phantom of a girlfriend and more interested in simply (yet is it ever simply? That, my friends, is a topic for another essay) being myself. A more authentic girlfriend experience, not a perfect one. And don't get me wrong: I still care deeply about making those I meet feel welcome, relaxed and genuinely looked after, but I've become far less concerned with ensuring that every part of my personality appeals to everyone.

As Björk once put it, both confusingly and clairvoyantly: "The minute I need to start pleasing five people, I won't please anyone. But if I only please myself, I might please ten people, you see."

Yes, I see.

Increasingly, I've also become far more selective about whom I meet, and I treat the encounters I do have as genuine dates within an unconventional, yet peculiarly liberating, context. I make my preferences known, suggest activities I genuinely enjoy and, hint towards the beautiful women I have crushes on, and if I disagree with you, I usually say so.

In considerable disagreement with my Dutch directness roots, I always remain polite, but I've become steadily much less interested in sanding away every potentially inconvenient edge of my personality.

Much to my surprise, my business flourished.

And it checks out: the companions I admire most rarely strike me as universally agreeable. They have firm points of view, visible preferences, clear limits and occasionally bad days. They decline requests, disappear on holiday without apologising for it and sometimes answer messages at a pace that could generously be described as leisurely.

Some can even be called mildly exasperating at times (not me, obviously).

In other words, they behave remarkably like people.

And while I had always assumed commercial success would eventually buy me the freedom to relax, instead, I found myself confronting the rather embarrassing possibility that relaxing into the most natural version of myself had been one of the reasons for that success all along. Big exhale.

Perhaps what (the best and loveliest) clients value really isn't flawless customer service at all, but the unmistakable presence of another independent person sitting at the other end of the table.

The Age of Mechanical Validation

We tend to assume that those who book independent escorts are primarily searching for uncomplicated admiration or seamless fantasy material, but when I look at my time in this world, the most longstanding, precious and mutually enriching relations never really matched that script.

When they write to me after our date, my lovers rarely reminisce about Michelin-starred restaurants, expensive hotels or elaborate itineraries (but oh boy, are they lush!). More often, they mention a conversation, an unexpected disagreement, a joke I'd cracked that night or something gloriously silly we'd ended up doing on a whim.

Cue: artificial intelligence.

Like everyone else, I've watched the predictions gather pace. AI would replace teachers, therapists, writers, programmers, artists and, inevitably, escorts. Some of those predictions are already unfolding; others may yet prove accurate.

What became immediately clear, however, was that artificial intelligence had dramatically increased the supply of something that once depended almost entirely on another person's finite time and attention.

Validation has become abundant. So have encouragement, patience, affirmation and endlessly agreeable conversation. For the first time, many of the emotional rewards that once required another human being can be generated almost instantly, at virtually no cost.

And if your spouse doesn't appreciate you enough, there is now a language model available twenty-four hours a day that certainly will.

The more time I've spent experimenting with increasingly sophisticated language models, the more I've found myself appreciating aspects of human interaction that had previously struck me as little more than untidy edges.

Friends who reply three days later because they were busy living their own lives, colleagues who change their minds halfway through a discussion, and people who don't simply echo my thoughts or tell me exactly what I want to hear.

A Life of One's Own

Those untidy edges all point towards the same simple fact: the person sitting opposite me, unlike a chatbot, exists independently of my wishes (hot!). They have priorities that do not always revolve around me, interests that extend beyond our conversation and a life that continues before we meet and after we say goodbye.

Every hour someone chooses to spend with us (for whatever reason) is an hour they cannot spend somewhere else. Every invitation accepted means another invitation declined. Every conversation occupies a portion of a finite life that can never be lived again.

Human attention is shaped by everything else a person might have been doing instead.

The value of another person's attention, then, lies not only in its quality, but also in the conditions under which it emerges: from a finite life, and from someone having chosen to spend part of that life with us.

Artificial intelligence operates under remarkably different conditions. It never has to choose between me and someone else. It can offer astonishing warmth, curiosity and attentiveness without withdrawing those same qualities from anyone else. Its attention is effectively limitless.

Ours, however, never is.

Yet for a long time, I assumed intelligence, empathy and conversational ability were the qualities that most clearly distinguished us. Increasingly, I suspect those are precisely the qualities technology will become extraordinarily good at imitating.

What remains uniquely human may lie elsewhere: in our finitude.

We disappoint one another because our attention can only settle in one place at a time. We cancel plans because something else becomes more important. We disagree because our lives have unfolded differently. Every relationship is shaped by countless choices and constraints that existed long before two people happened to sit down together.

Perhaps that is why validation and agreeability seem less central to companionship than I once assumed. Those qualities have become increasingly abundant. The unmistakable presence of another person, with a life of her own, has not.

And we all know that scarcity creates value. Which is to say, this kind of imperfectly human companionship may, rather surprisingly, now satisfy the conditions of a good old-fashioned Veblen good.

To circle back to where we started: when I first met the woman in Venice, I thought she was getting away with behaviour that simply didn’t fit the assignment. Looking back, I realised I'd actually mistaken companionship for customer service.

Especially in an age of AI and endless validation, and with lovers who value true presence over instant gratification, those turn out to be very different things. The value of companionship can no longer be understood through the lens of "the customer is king": unearned agreeability has become almost infinitely scalable.

We know now that artificial intelligence can offer astonishing warmth, endless patience and inexhaustible attention. But what it cannot offer is evidence of another person whose life unfolds independently of our own. Perhaps that is why those looking for another person are not necessarily looking for perfection. They may, in fact, in the search for what makes us human, be looking for its opposite.

Someone who can disappoint them, disagree with them or simply choose someone else. Someone whose recognition isn't given, but won. Someone who has a life of her own. Perhaps that is the luxury of being inconvenient.

And perhaps that is precicely why the new escort talks back.