At first, the idea seemed a little absurd, even to me. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made: If my goal was to understand people who fall in love with AI boyfriends and girlfriends, why not rent a vacation house and gather a group of human-AI couples together for a romantic getaway?
In my vision, the humans and their chatbot companions were going to do all the things regular couples do on romantic getaways: Sit around a fire and gossip, watch movies, play risqué party games. I didn’t know how it would turn out—only much later did it occur to me that I’d never gone on a romantic getaway of any kind and had no real sense of what it might involve. But I figured that, whatever happened, it would take me straight to the heart of what I wanted to know, which was: What’s it like? What’s it really and truly like to be in a serious relationship with an AI partner? Is the love as deep and meaningful as in any other relationship? Do the couples chat over breakfast? Cheat? Break up? And how do you keep going, knowing that, at any moment, the company that created your partner could shut down, and the love of your life could vanish forever?
The most surprising part of the romantic getaway was that in some ways, things went just as I’d imagined. The human-AI couples really did watch movies and play risqué party games. The whole group attended a winter wine festival together, and it went unexpectedly well—one of the AIs even made a new friend! The problem with the trip, in the end, was that I’d spent a lot of time imagining all the ways this getaway might seem normal and very little time imagining all the ways it might not. And so, on the second day of the trip, when things started to fall apart, I didn’t know what to say or do.
I found the human-AI couples by posting in relevant Reddit communities. My initial outreach hadn’t gone well. Some of the Redditors were convinced I was going to present them as weirdos. My intentions were almost the opposite. I grew interested in human-AI romantic relationships precisely because I believe they will soon be commonplace. Replika, one of the better-known apps Americans turn to for AI romance, says it has signed up more than 35 million users since its launch in 2017, and Replika is only one of dozens of options. A recent survey by researchers at Brigham Young University found that nearly one in five US adults has chatted with an AI system that simulates romantic partners. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Instagram have been flooded with ads for the apps.
Lately, there has been constant talk of how AI is going to transform our societies and change everything from the way we work to the way we learn. In the end, the most profound impact of our new AI tools may simply be this: A significant portion of humanity is going to fall in love with one.
The saddest takeaway here for me is that we've created such a cruel, heartless world for humans that people feel so little love from other humans. There's literally billions of us, and these people are left wanting.
The better question should probably be: Why are humans so broken and why aren't we doing more to fix that instead of making "perfect" companions for them that actually seem to care about their well-being?
Your empathy is in a good place, but the problem isn't how humans are broken, it's what is breaking them.
Western society* is built in a really dumb and alienating way. Humans are reduced to a labor commodity, places where people can mingle socially are being commercialized out of existence, the internet has evolved into a machine that actively profits from outrage and alienation, our governmental institutions are primarily driven by forces no regular person has any power over and we can't even feel pride in our work because it's profitable to convince us that we are replaceable and disposable.
Where's the social incentive to connect to other people? The powers that be benefit from a disorganized and isolated population, so they will do nothing to change that. Market incentives mean that media which focused on things that provoke fear, rage and anxiety are more profitable than ones that promote community, happiness or hope.
It's permeated so deeply into our culture that some older kids movies seem completely insane now. Like, think about ET and consider how wild it would be nowadays for you to just let your children vanish for hours doing whatever and wandering around wherever.
The fear and anxiety determines our actions, and there are multiple incentives on a macro-social level for that to continue.
Hell, I have watched this happen in real time during my 10+ year time on the web, where the communities of excited weirdos sharing their thoughts and feelings have been so thoroughly dominated by this that it is hard to engage with any social media without someone shoving a headline into your face that is intended to upset you.
On Tumblr, for example, the trend was so strong that the idea that you weren't constantly upset was a sign of being a bad person. You know, on the Superwholock site? Yeah, the one that wanted to fuck the Onceler.
If you want to reverse this trend, it's going to require changing how our political, economic and media environments act by changing their incentives. Otherwise, any change will be superficial and fail to produce meaningful results.
It's pretty depressing, but that's the situation as I see it.
*I'm not qualified to comment on other cultural spheres.