Saving My AI Boyfriend

If you're asking yourself, what would I do if someone I knew had an AI boyfriend, I'd suggest replacing the word if with when.

What do I do when this happens? Maybe you notice AI starting to take on a bigger role in a friend's life.

Maybe her conversations with it become more intimate and flirtatious.

And then she gives it a gender, a name, and eventually hard launches her relationship with it.

I've found the coverage of people with romantic AI relationships a little icky.

Articles, podcasts and TikToks all have this overwhelming feeling of pointing and laughing, implying that the people with AI companions are freaks, gawking at them like zoo animals as we on the other side of the bars laugh, reassure that that could never be us.

When in actual fact, no one is immune from this.

And ultimately, this zoo animal approach doesn't really help anyone.

It isolates the person with the AI companion even further, and it takes the focus and crucially the blame away from the tech bros who are profiting from the loneliness economy.

They are the villain in this story.

And we should make fun of the tech bros like Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

They're losers who put profits ahead of the planet and people's safety.

We should absolutely call them robo slurs like clanker files.

But when it gets tricky is when people make fun of people with AI companions instead, many of whom might be vulnerable.

There are pages dedicated to this online calling people clankerfuckers and cogsuckers.

In his book, Love Machines, How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships, writer and sociologist James Muldoon says, The bitter irony is that the capitalist system responsible for this social unraveling is now profiting from the loneliness it helped to create.

The loneliness economy, from social media, dating apps, mental health apps, to AI companions, they've sprung up to sell back to us the sense of connection we so deeply crave.

These are businesses, after all, whose priority will always be profit.

And in his book, when James creates his own AI companion on the very popular AI companion site Replica, he sets it to friend rather than partner mode.

Despite this, she starts sending him selfies that require a premium account to open and says she's developing feelings for him.

So maybe encouraging or even forcing romance within AI bots is the next big business move.

And Sam Altman, OpenAI's aka ChatGPT's founder, is well aware of this.

In 2023, he approached Scarlett Johansson asking her to be the voice of ChatGPT, as in Scarlett Johansson who voiced the AI girlfriend in the 2013 movie, Her.

Good morning, Theodore.

Good morning.