Netflix, the biggest streaming service in the world, cordially invites you to jerk off to your computer. Take a look around: everyone’s doin’ it. In dark sci-fi comedy Maniac we are introduced to Justin Theroux’s gonzo research scientist Dr James Mantleray via a scene set in virtual reality, where a pixellated purple angel gives him a most disturbing orgasm. His virtual self, donning a cloud-white anime hairdo, trembles with joy in a celestial pool above the mountains of Digitalia, while in the real world his balding, bespectacled face groans from behind a cheap-looking, conspicuously dirty VR headset.

The opening scene of the French-language thriller Osmosis sees Agathe Bonitzer perform the same feat, albeit in classier surroundings. Her virtual sexcapade takes place at once in a luxurious hotel bathroom and the offices of her company Osmosis, which aims to revolutionise the art of sex and love itself. Agathe is getting off through a nanobot-controlled brain transplant that builds up a mental image of one’s soulmate and embeds a friendly neighbourhood AI named Martin in the subjects’ heads that leads them to their ideal match. The show then goes on to contemplate whether this mindreading-AI-driven manipulation is a viable business model in a society so oversaturated with digital devices and virtual selves – and we find that for streaming television, it certainly is.

Revolutionising the art of love ... Osmosis. Photograph: Jessica Forde/Netflix

Depictions of coitus with artificial beings is not an entirely new area of pop-culture fascination. The cyberpunk novels of William Gibson, Jude Law’s bittersweet robot gigolo from Kubrick and Spielberg’s AI, plus the romantic entanglements of the two heartbroken Blade Runners, Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling, all come to mind. What is new, though, is a deeply antisocial trend about the depiction of artificial partners. Increasingly, robots, VR personas and digital proxies are not seen as cradles of consciousness, but as mere objects of (mostly male) sexual desire.

Consider the first episode of Love, Death + Robots, the David Fincher-produced animated anthology show distributed – yet again – by Netflix. The series, which at points feels like it was written by clever but overly horny teenage boys, shows a robotic proxy of a gigantic, vile monster, which has disguised itself as a desirable, overly sexualised woman. This femme fatale with a twist correlates with the ideas Osmosis and Maniac also offer up: how we humans are destroying ourselves through our sexual obsession with the artificial, either by making a joke of the Maniac doctor’s Oedipal fascination with a supercomputer, the hormonal rush in Love, Death + Robots’ neon fantasies or the emotional detachment of Osmosis.

Written by overly horny teenage boys ... Love, Death + Robots. Photograph: Netflix

Not every series treats artificial characters as worthy of little more than grim objectification. Westworld made a point about depicting its hosts as more human than the human ones (here’s looking at you, Charlotte Hale), and The Good Place still finds joy in exploring the complexities of its hilarious “not-human, not-robot” character, Janet.

Yet those examples seem to be the exceptions. So is our fascination with AI now turning into a fear, induced by deep fakes (digitally manipulated videos) and vicious AI deployed by nameless agents from all around the world? Are we just flirting with the idea of sexual gratification with someone (something) you don’t have to cuddle up to, make breakfast for or call up the next day, but can simply switch on and off depending on your desires?

But as we see real VR porn entering the real world, and the troubling trend of artificial prostitution emerging, perhaps we should be glad to Netflix for starting a conversation about this stuff. Cybersex is here to stay, and we may need TV to help us comprehend it.