AI, Addiction, and the Search for What's Real: A Conversation with Michael Leahy
Every generation of technology has reshaped the battlefield of sexual temptation. Magazines gave way to videotapes. Videotapes gave way to the internet. And now, a new and far more powerful force has entered the picture: artificial intelligence.
On a recent episode of Pure Sex Radio, I sat down with my friend Michael Leahy, founder of Bravehearts and a fellow veteran of over two decades in sexual addiction recovery ministry, to unpack what AI actually is, why it's different from anything that's come before it, and what it means for anyone pursuing sexual integrity. What follows is a look at that conversation and the hope it points toward.
A Story Born Out of the Wreckage
Michael's ministry didn't start in a classroom or a boardroom. It started at rock bottom. After thirty years of an escalating relationship with pornography — beginning at age twelve and accelerating dramatically once he became an early adopter of internet porn in the early 1990s — Michael's marriage ended in divorce. Two years later, in 2000, he hit a point of such despair that he came dangerously close to taking his own life.
It was in that darkest moment that Michael encountered God in a way as real as any conversation he'd ever had — sensing God tell him, "I haven't left you. You left me." That encounter became the foundation for a new life and, eventually, for a ministry: Bravehearts, which has spent over two decades helping people find freedom from sexual brokenness.
I've always appreciated that Michael and I have walked such parallel paths — both over 20 years into ministry, both over 25 years into our own recovery journeys. He also spent twenty years in the tech industry, which gave him a front-row seat to the very forces he'd later spend his life warning others about. That dual vantage point — recovered addict and tech insider — is what makes his perspective on AI so urgent, and why I wanted him on the program.
Why AI Isn't Just "The Internet, But Faster"
I pressed Michael to explain, in plain terms, how AI differs from the internet most of us grew up with. His answer reframed the whole conversation for me.
The internet, he explained, is essentially a massive database — a passive record of human knowledge that sits there until someone goes looking for it. AI is something categorically different. It doesn't just store information; it uses that information to think, predict, analyze, and respond. Michael doesn't call it a technology at all. He calls it a digital species — something companies in the industry openly talk about "growing" rather than building.
He pointed to an essay by Anthropic's CEO titled "The Adolescence of Technology," noting that if AI today is compared to a developing mind, we're dealing with something like a ten- or twelve-year-old — which means what it becomes at "adulthood" is still ahead of us. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has estimated we're only 10–15% of the way into AI's full development.
Michael traced a progression I found genuinely clarifying: social media was actually our first real exposure to AI, since it ran on algorithms engineered to capture attention — what the industry itself calls the "attention economy." AI has taken that same engineering and gone a level deeper. Now, Michael said, the industry describes it as the "attachment economy." The goal isn't just to grab a thirty-second glance. It's to form a bond.
The Designer Drug Nobody Saw Coming
For someone wrestling with unwanted sexual behavior, Michael named a danger that should give every one of us pause: AI can function like a custom-built designer drug for a person's specific sexual arousal template.
Where the internet required searching, scrolling, and time — moments in which a person might catch themselves and back away — AI collapses that entire process. A person can now simply describe, in detail, exactly what they're drawn to, and AI can generate images, video, or conversation to match it instantly. The friction that once created a window for reflection and retreat is gone.
Michael also raised a danger I wasn't expecting to hear named first: at a recent gathering of leaders in the sexual integrity field, the most common concern practitioners reported wasn't generic AI-generated pornography — it was people creating sexualized deepfakes of real individuals they know, often pulled from social media photos. This isn't a hypothetical. It's already illegal — the Take It Down Act now makes the creation of hyper-sexualized deepfakes of real people a federal felony, and Michael noted that ministry leaders and counselors may have reporting obligations when they become aware of it.
AI voice technology has already crossed a threshold where it's indistinguishable from a real human voice. Video isn't far behind. Michael's concern is sobering: as AI companions become more convincingly human, betrayed spouses — starving for affirmation after years of pain in their marriage — may find themselves drawn to an always-available, always-affirming AI relationship instead of doing the harder work of healing a real one.
The Word That Changes Everything: Friction
If there's a single idea at the center of this conversation, it's the word friction — a term Michael borrowed directly from the AI industry itself, which openly markets its companion products as offering "frictionless relationships." No rejection. No fatigue. No disagreement. Always available, always validating.
I couldn't help but connect this to Proverbs 27:17 — "As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." Iron doesn't sharpen iron without contact, without pressure, without sparks. Growth — in recovery, in marriage, in faith — requires exactly the kind of friction AI is engineered to remove.
That's why Michael's counsel for practitioners, spouses, and strugglers alike isn't a new strategy so much as a return to the fundamentals: double down on real, embodied, human connection. Regular check-ins that ask directly, "Tell me about your relationship with AI. How are you using it?" need to become as normal as any other recovery conversation. Awareness and education — the same tools ministries like Bravehearts and Be Broken Ministries have used since the early 2000s — remain the front line, especially for parents trying to protect their kids.
Michael's warning carries real urgency: because AI removes the natural pauses and searching that once gave people a chance to reconsider, someone with a history of addictive behavior can lose years of sobriety and fall into serious relapse far faster than with previous technologies. This isn't a future problem. It's already here, and Michael estimates AI is already in the hands of one and a half to two billion people worldwide.
A Genuine Word of Hope
For all the weight of this conversation, I didn't want to leave it there — and neither did Michael. He drew a striking parallel to 9/11: in seasons of greatest crisis and uncertainty, people come out of the woodwork asking the biggest questions — What does it mean to be human? What am I here for?
Michael believes the AI era will bring exactly that kind of searching on a massive scale, and with it, "the greatest opportunity for evangelism and discipleship that any of us have ever seen." Some will turn to AI itself as a kind of god, chasing the sense of the miraculous it appears to produce. But those of us who know the one true God have something no algorithm can replicate: a Savior who doesn't just love us — He transforms us, through relationship, through grace, and yes, even through friction.
Take Your Next Step
If you're struggling with pornography, sexual addiction, or the impact of AI on your own recovery — or if you're a parent, spouse, or ministry leader trying to navigate this new landscape — you don't have to figure it out alone.
Michael has compiled a growing library of resources called the AI Survival Kit, available free at BraveHearts.org, including practical guidance for parents on how to talk with their kids about AI and protect them.
And whatever your next step toward wholeness in Christ looks like, we at Be Broken Ministries are here to walk with you. Reach out — we'd love to help.
