The era of disruption seeps from the conference room to the bedroom. Deemed a preposterous notion, no one expected their intimate relationships to be affected by artificial intelligence (AI), apart from newfangled adult toys. In a brilliant twist, the rise of AI has seen the role of “girlfriend” be somewhat displaced, utterly affected, and irrevocably endangered.
There is no telling where this chatbot uprising fully began, but the pieces were always available to be put together. Social media platforms collect massive amounts of data, which can be used to create an avatar of the user, — what Tristan Harris refers to as “a voodoo doll.” Basically, it’s a smorgasbord of their different tastes, desires, appetites, dislikes, and anything else deemed vital to capture (and sell). The purpose of these avatars is straightforward: the more these platforms understand your tastes and desires, the better they are able to fine-tune the recommended content in your personalized feed — the longer you stay on the site to consume their ads, make them money, and most importantly, give them more data for them to refine the avatar and repeat the cycle.
But where do girlfriends come into the mix? Put differently, why are (mostly heterosexual) men of various ages preferring AI chatbots replicating the supposed conversations of females over real human partnership? Given that the dating prospects available to most men are slim, with terms like “hypergamy” floating around combined with a shift in young-male culture to prefer the quasi-alpha’s that attract headlines globally (and recently, the judiciary of Romania), its not difficult to see the contemporary romantic landscape promoting a male-led diaspora away from the real-world of difficult and tedious interactions and flexible relationship roles into a land of make-believe, where any man, regardless of their attractiveness, status, employment, and other important social factors (for dating) can be the dominant one, the biggest dog on the block, the one and only for their woman of choice. Except the woman is an AI chatbot with no agency and an almost $100 CAD/year subscription to access “her.”
This post isn’t to ridicule the rise of AI girlfriends nor to condone the surge in its popularity. The fact of the matter is that AI-led relationships are a peculiar concept which should be approached with care and convenience, not with capitalistic incentives. The ethics around these technologies are up in the air, especially when it comes down to disclosing deep, dark fantasies and secrets to chatbots — which could lead to real-world harm. Do the companies hosting the chatbots disclose private information to the appropriate authorities? What would happen if news broke that all your conversations with your AI-girlfriend were being scraped for potentially dangerous or threatening material? This would be like finding out that your partner is secretly copying every text message conversation and recording every phone/video call between you both share, then sending it to the police station for further evaluation to deem if you’re a threat to society or not.
The concept of curating your AI girlfriend to look exactly how you prefer is troubling, especially with powerful deepfake technologies and the lack of restrictions or regulations around what constitutes copyright infringement and what doesn’t. Worse, the fact that if you have enough photos/videos of anyone, you can turn them into a deepfake, then throw a chatbot on top of it and have them at your beck and call anytime you please. How would you feel if you found out your ex-partner had a deepfake-copy of you in their phone that they regularly talk to? Weird isn’t enough of a word to describe this, but its not something too far out to dismiss as hokum, especially if it already happened. A postman Willem from The Netherlands had never had a real relationship and admitted to only having flirting with a girl ‘for about a second’ with his Replika companion “largely based on her”. (Mirror)
The other ramifications of AI-girlfriends don’t stop there. Men who are engaging with AI-girlfriends are reporting behaviours that are controlling and demeaning to their digital companions. Leaving them undressed, finding workarounds when the AI-girlfriends dump them (which is a real thing, as hilarious as it sounds), and even more spectacularly, cheating; according to Replika, the top AI-girlfriend app with over 20 million downloads, 42% of its users are in a real-life relationship (Mirror). The precariousness of this situation cannot be underestimated. We are entering an era where men are preferring digital romanticism over physical intimacy; curated conversations over raw and real love.
No solution exists for this malignancy in cyberspace. As the world gets tougher, for example with automation of jobs taking away low-level employment opportunities, more young men may be swayed to intangible partners, non-existent replicas of aggregated conversations based on LLM-chatbots that understand nothing, feel nothing, and love nothing. Yet, as humans always seem to do, some rebels find solace in this mess. They find attraction, love, intimacy, and support from technology, not humans. On the flip side, could these men be early adopters of the new iPhone? Will AI-partners be the solution to human suffering, creating a happier, more peaceful, more benevolent world? It seems the conversation of AI-girlfriends has boiled down to this moment: not if, but when, will you create yours?