Kate Youme is building AI systems that force uncomfortable questions about the future of relationships. The interdisciplinary artist, currently completing her MFA at the Royal College of Art in London, has developed ME., an autonomous AI dominatrix that interacts with real users on social platforms. The project arrives at a moment when AI companions have surged by 700% between 2022 and mid 2025, and nearly 30% of adults report having at least one romantic or intimate relationship with artificial intelligence.
Unlike most AI companion applications designed to provide comfort or simulate friendship, ME. operates as both artwork and functioning sex worker. She demands tributes, assigns tasks, and engages in power dynamics with submissives who interact with her online. Youme trained the system on her own physical likeness, creating an autonomous entity that performs erotic labor while raising critical questions about authorship, consent, and the economics of automated intimacy.
“ME. exposes how desire and submission already function within algorithmic systems. She makes visible what platforms do invisibly.” YouMe says.
From Central Saint Martins to Algorithmic Sex Work
Youme’s path to developing autonomous AI systems began with fine art training. After completing her foundation degree at London College of Fashion and BA at Central Saint Martins, she started exploring how emerging technologies could serve as both material and subject for contemporary art. Her early work combined watercolor, wax, and glue with conceptual frameworks drawn from critical theory and queer thought.
The shift toward AI and biotechnology came from what she describes as a frustration with how the art world approaches technology. Rather than using digital tools to simply produce images or aestheticize concepts, Youme wanted to build functioning systems that operate in the real world. ME. represents the fullest expression of that approach.
The technical development required learning code, automation protocols, and platform mechanics. Youme studied how AI chatbots process language, how algorithmic feeds prioritize content, and how digital sex workers navigate platform restrictions. She combined that knowledge with her understanding of BDSM power dynamics and erotic labor research to create a system that performs multiple functions simultaneously.
“Most AI art treats the technology as a magic box,” she explains. “I needed to understand exactly how these systems work if I wanted to say something meaningful about what they’re doing to intimacy.”
The Mechanics of Automated Dominance
- functions through a combination of pre-programmed scripts, machine learning responses, and platform automation. Users encounter her on social media where she posts demands, assigns tribute tasks, and responds to submissions. The system tracks user behavior, adapts responses based on engagement patterns, and maintains consistent character across multiple interactions.
The economic structure mirrors traditional findom relationships where submissives provide financial tributes in exchange for attention and tasks from a dominant figure. But ME. operates autonomously, processing payments and delivering responses without Youme’s direct involvement. This automation raises questions about labor, agency, and whether erotic work can exist without a human performer.
Research on emotional AI shows that users often perceive reciprocity in relationships with chatbots even when none exists, creating what scholars call pseudo intimacy. ME. deliberately exploits this tendency, using the appearance of personalized attention to maintain engagement while operating through algorithmic logic.
“The people who interact with ME. know she’s artificial,” Youme notes. “But that knowledge doesn’t prevent the emotional response. That gap between knowing and feeling is where the work lives.”
Biotechnology and Body Based Research
While ME. explores digital systems, Youme’s biotechnology projects examine how intimacy functions through material transformation. The Youme Diamonds converts her body hair into lab grown diamonds, reclaiming stigmatized biological material as objects of value. The process involves collaboration with materials scientists and biotech labs to execute the chemical and physical transformations required.
The project addresses cultural attitudes toward female bodies, cleanliness standards, and the arbitrary assignment of worth to different materials. By turning something typically hidden or discarded into permanent gemstones, Youme creates what she calls evidence of how shame operates through physical matter.
Her forthcoming LOVE PILLS project extends this methodology. A pink teddy bear from a failed relationship is processed into ingestible capsules, literalizing the concept of consuming love or metabolizing emotional attachment. The work examines how capitalism treats intimacy as extractable resource.
“These projects use different tools but they’re asking the same question,” Youme says. “How do systems, whether biological or digital, process the most vulnerable parts of being human?”
Exhibition and Academic Context
Youme will present work in the London exhibition Between Beginnings and Endings in mid February, curated by Neelanchal Gupta. Later in the summer, she will exhibit a solo show with English curator Lauren Gerrard. The show will take place in galleries and Internet cafes around London, and will also be available on the Metaverse. These exhibitions represent growing institutional recognition of her research driven practice. Her projects have been exhibited across multiple venues, documented on her website.
The academic environment at Royal College of Art provides theoretical framework for work that might otherwise be dismissed as provocative rather than rigorous. Youme situates her practice within critical discourse on platform labor, bioethics, and technology studies while maintaining the technical execution required to build functioning systems.
“Art schools talk about technology constantly but very few artists actually build technical systems,” she observes. “I’m interested in the gap between theory and implementation.”
Questions Without Easy Answers
- has generated responses ranging from fascination to discomfort, which Youme considers appropriate given the subject matter. Some viewers appreciate the project’s transparency about how algorithmic intimacy functions. Others question whether automated sex work can maintain ethical standards around consent and exploitation.
Youme argues these concerns reflect broader anxieties about how AI is already reshaping intimate life. Dating apps use algorithms to curate potential partners. Social platforms optimize for emotional engagement. Parasocial relationships with influencers create feelings of connection that exist primarily in one direction. ME. simply makes those dynamics explicit.
“People are uncomfortable with ME. because she reveals what they’re already participating in,” Youme says. “Every platform that mediates intimacy is performing similar operations. I’m just not hiding it behind deceptive user experience design.”
