Neel Dhar was 7 years old when he first clicked on an online ad that led to pornography.
Even though he didn’t understand what he saw, his curiosity took him down a rabbit hole of the internet and its darker corners. Over time, he found himself spending more and more hours there.
“The only thing I wanted was hard dopamine and nothing else,” he said.
Dhar, who is now 19 and lives in San Diego, is part of a generation that grew up with the internet, and pornography, in their back pockets. Much of what Dhar and his peers learned about intimacy and relationships during his high school years came from the sexualized content he encountered online.
“We grew up as internet kids, and we were exposed to it at a very young age,” he said.
But it’s also the digital natives of Gen Z — who encountered pornography before they knew what it was — who are at the forefront of fighting it.
About a year ago, Dhar finally decided to get help. He joined an app that connected him with other men trying to shake off the same habit.
Relay, the app that Dhar joined, was started by 27-year-old Chandler Rogers, who similarly struggled with a pornography habit and wanted to help men combat the addictive patterns.
“I would almost call it an awakening, of sorts, of people realizing this doesn’t align with creating safe, trusting relationships,” said Rogers, who co-founded Relay in 2021 while still in college at Brigham Young University.
Earlier this year, Joshua Haskell, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of Notre Dame, founded Ethos National that also focuses on accountability and is based on Catholic teachings.
But it’s no longer just Christian men sounding the alarm about pornography. Singer Billie Eilish, who is 23, said she was “incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn” and that it “destroyed” her brain. Other influencers with massive audiences, like Theo Von, have also taken an anti-pornography stance.
These views are showing up in data, too.
The number of young men who support tightening of restrictions around online pornography went up from 43% in 2021 to 63% in 2025, according to the Survey Center on American Life. And young men now express more support for online porn restrictions than men in middle age.
“I think Gen Z are telling other Gen Z that basically porn is stupid and you need to outgrow porn to be a real man,” Rogers said.
New threat: AI
Children typically encounter online pornography for the first time around age 12, according to a study by Common Sense Media. By the time they reach their teenage years, exposure becomes even more common: Nearly three-quarters of 13- to 17-year-olds say they’ve viewed pornography online, and more than half have already done so by age 13.
The pornography industry has grown into a massive, multibillion-dollar global business, valued at around $97 billion. In the United States alone, the market generates over $12 billion annually.
More recently, the rise of AI-generated content has made explicit material, of all varieties, easier to produce. In October, OpenAI announced that its AI assistant ChatGPT will soon allow verified adult users to generate erotic content under a new “age-gated” policy, starting in December. The shift is partly a response to criticism of ChatGPT’s overly deferential, sometimes sycophantic conversational style.
AI-enabled pornography creation means access to endlessly customizable adult content and conversations — at any time.
“The range of uses this technology can be put to is limited largely by the imagination (and whatever restrictions AI firms will agree to bake into their models),” according to a recent article in The Economist. The article concluded with an alarming prognosis: “Because AI can make images so cheaply, and allows ever more outlandish scenarios, the web will soon be flooded with increasingly extreme synthetic smut.”
The proliferation of companion AI apps has also begun to shift the understanding of what it means to be connected with someone.
The 10 most popular AI companion websites collected 78.5 million visits in the first quarter of 2025, according to a study from Oxford and Cambridge Universities cited by The Economist.
“It’s about the feeling of being seen,” Rogers said.
He has tried recently talking to an AI companion and while it’s not positioned as a sexual AI app, he was surprised how quickly the hints toward more sexualized conversation began to creep in.
“The thing that concerns me now with AI is that it is deliberately designed to kind of understand your taste and to feed you more of what will keep you coming back,” said Rogers. “And that’s what the AI algorithms on social media do really well at.”
This could make real relationships, which require patience and navigating differences, feel less appealing compared to the ease and instant gratification of AI‑based interactions.
The problem is not porn, but pain
But the deeper forces pushing people toward artificial intimacy are often internal, experts have said. Growing loneliness and a lack of real human connection are driving more young people toward seeking intimacy through the screen.
For instance, when the pandemic shut everything down, porn use soared. With normal social and romantic life on hold, many people turned to digital forms of connection or distraction.
It was in this environment that Rogers started Relay with his wife and classmates. Prior to getting married, and while still a student at Brigham Young University, he would ride a bus to a therapy group for young men, hiding his attendance from his roommates. Over time, he started to recognize the shame he’d been living with, without even realizing it. He also wanted the kind of support that went beyond a once-a-week meeting.
Now, through Relay, people are put in groups of seven or eight people, where they check in with each other and can draw on advice and research from therapists about addictive behaviors.
The app focuses less on discussing pornography directly and more on helping users build emotional awareness and tolerate difficult feelings that are driving behavior.
Relay’s key message is that pornography isn’t the main problem, but instead a symptom of something else. “You don’t have a porn problem — you have a pain problem,” Rogers said. He believes that pornography often functions as a psychological crutch, a quick way for the brain to soothe discomfort.
Although Rogers is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Relay is not designed for a faith community. Users can, however, choose to join a group made up of fellow believers.
That’s been one of the shifts that Rogers has noticed.
Even a few years ago, anti-pornography causes were championed mainly by religious groups, while the harms of pornography are now being acknowledged by both religious and non-religious people.
“All young people are realizing that doom scrolling, TikTok, porn and video games is not helping them become their best self,” Rogers said. “The young people are agreeing that the porn industry is not your friend.”
But the young men sounding the alarm on the issue aligns with a broader “vibe shift” among Gen Z — a turn toward conservative politics and embrace of traditional ways of living, according to Jason Fierstein, mental health counselor and founder of Phoenix Men’s Counseling.
“I think younger, conservative men have certain concepts or worldviews about traditional life that is gaining popularity again,” Fierstein wrote to the Deseret News. “And pornography may be out of step with the traditional values some younger men may want to reinstate.”
Restoring connection
Gen Z and millennials, too, are beginning to feel the long-term fallout of the pornography habits they have developed as teenagers, Rogers said.
“Now they’re in their 30s and 40s and in committed relationships,” Rogers said. “Their partner finds out and they realize how the trust is affected.”
Dhar, who grew up outside of San Francisco, began to feel these side effects of pornography in high school. He was insecure and often idealized girls he didn’t know, which made it hard to approach them. He described seeing them through a “pornographic perspective.”
Relay app users set boundaries and goals — getting to bed earlier, staying off Instagram, eating healthier or cultivating other positive habits.
For Dhar, making these lifestyle changes was crucial for recovery.
He started going to the gym and running, and even when he failed, he kept at it.
The same internet that had once been a portal to damaging content became a source of help. Instead of memes, social media and video games, Dhar sought out research on neuroscience and addiction, along with motivational content from podcasters like Andrew Huberman.
“I saw improvement, and I saw that feeling was so much better than any pornography could be,” he said.
Last year, Dhar joined the U.S. Navy, in part to turn his life around and continue building structure and resilience.
Dhar’s view is that his generation has been coddled too much. Modern culture demands less of young people, he said, which eliminates the friction and challenge that builds emotional resilience in young men.
“Young men aren’t really taught how to deal with life effectively,” Dhar said. Kids are discouraged from taking accountability for their mistakes, Dhar believes.
“Now, kids are being told ‘you fail or you screw up — it’s not your fault, you get a participation trophy,’” Dhar said. “It’s about always finding an excuse as to why things aren’t right in your life.” Instead, Dhar is in favor of “extreme ownership” and “extreme accountability,” including with pornography.
It’s not so much about being exposed to pornography — it’s pretty much inevitable, Dhar said — but about taking the reins over the natural impulses and embracing real-life sources of dopamine and connection.
The way to cultivate resilience in young men, he said, is to teach them how to control their emotions, navigate hardships and failure, and live “a kind of stoic way of life.”
“When you can get that natural dopamine from actually achieving something, working hard despite failure — you can pretty much easily conquer pornography,” Dhar said. “Like, there is no need for me to even watch it, because my real life is so much better than this fake life on a fake screen.”