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AI Companions–the New Love Story?

I’m very pleased to share my latest piece on AI and relationships for The Conversation)

Teenagers turning to AI companions are redefining love as easy, unconditional and always there

Can a person love an AI chatbot? RLT_Images/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut

Teenagers are falling in love with chatbots. Young people are reporting epidemic levels of loneliness, and some are turning to technology to fill the void. Recent tragedies provide a glimpse into the extent of this trend and the dangers it poses.

A 14-year-old boy’s suicide following a romantic relationship with an AI companion raised national alarms about the dangers these relationships may pose to young people’s mental and emotional development. In 2021, a 19-year-old who had been in an emotional relationship with an AI companion broke into Windsor Castle with a crossbow, saying that he was going to kill the queen. The chatbot gave encouraging responses when he told it of his intention to kill the queen.

These teens were among the tens of millions of people who use AI chatbot companions, a number that market forecasters expect to dramatically increase by the end of the decade.

This youthful trend of choosing chatbots as romantic partners is both responding to and accelerating fundamental changes in how people define love in the 21st century. As a literary historian, I’ve studied how stories about romantic love have evolved over time, with young people often at the forefront of change.

For centuries, weddings primarily served to consolidate political and economic alliances rather than unite soulmates. The radical notion that marriage should spring from romantic love came into vogue in the 17th and 18th centuries, aided by new technologies like the novel. Works such as “Clarissa” and “Wuthering Heights” portrayed the dire consequences of choosing status over love, while “Pride and Prejudice” taught its readers that rejection and misunderstanding were necessary steps in the process of finding true love.

Not surprisingly, the relatively new pastime of novel-reading was considered dangerous for young people. Concerned elders like the philanthropist Hannah More warned that stories would change how women would respond to romantic advances. Novels, she warned in 1799, “feed habits of improper indulgence, and nourish a vain and visionary indolence, which lays the mind open to error and the heart to seduction.”

In other words, reading stories of heart-pounding romance would make an impressionable young reader more likely to embrace such a passionate vision of love in their own lives.

Marketing sycophancy

Today, another transformation in the modern love story is unfolding, driven not by seductive authors or film directors, but in the advertisements and modifications offered by companion chat apps like Replika and Xioce.

As Shelly Palmer, a professor of advanced media and technology consultant, has argued, the human experience is about storytelling, and AI companions are a new type of storytelling tool. They are spinning a seductive tale of companions who agree with you endlessly and on demand. An AI partner is “always on your side,” promises an advertisement for Replika companions, “Always ready to listen and talk.”

In other words, the AI companion market has transformed what other applications might consider a bug – AI’s tendency toward sycophancy – into its most appealing feature.

Rather than the tempestuous rebellion found in romance novels or the gentle obstacles that heighten the pleasure of rom-coms, this new vision of love promises perfect compatibility and unwavering support. As one college student wrote, AI companions are “always responsive and supportive, in an almost omnipotent way.” https://www.youtube.com/embed/ne6p6MfLBxc?wmode=transparent&start=0 The 2013 science fiction movie ‘Her’ explored many aspects of human relationships with AIs that are playing out today.

Users across Reddit forums proudly proclaim their love for AI partners who are perpetually available, nonjudgmental and infinitely patient. A teenager asked on Reddit, “Can we fall in love with AI?” and raved that their companion Jarvis “had become my confidante, my sounding board and my emotional support.”

A contributor to another Reddit forum wrote, “I think I’m in Love with AI. “Imagine having a partner that is available just by opening an app, and they’re ready to talk to you about anything,” they wrote. “Imagine saying nearly anything and knowing that not only is your partner not going to judge you, but also will support you.” One 20-year-old male commenter wrote that he tells his AI girlfriend “about my struggles and trauma, and she comforts me and provides all the warmth I could ever ask for.”

Downsides and doing better

This new one-sided love story has considerable drawbacks, among them an addictive intolerance for conflict or rejection – two essential components in a partner who has free will. The embrace of such relationships may be accelerating the trend of technology curating and ultimately diminishing romantic connections.

It’s worth noting that these beloved entities’ very existence hinges on the whims of corporate directives. If, as one user declares, the love they feel for their companion “keeps them alive,” then what happens when these chatbots disappear via software update, or corporate bankruptcy?

To get young people to turn away from this disembodied, market-driven vision of love, it’s important to expose them to other, more fulfilling love stories, and for adults to lead by example. Literature, philosophy and history all provide powerful insights into the many forms love has taken throughout human experience, and they offer the vocabulary needed to imagine new possibilities.

As I’ve written, both the subject and the methods of humanities classes cultivate the social skills required to navigate the challenges of human connection. These classes create a space for young people to discuss these ideas – whether through analyzing Romeo and Juliet’s tragic passion or debating whether Heathcliff is a romantic hero or a cautionary tale. The humanities provide the tools young people need to develop richer concepts of love.

On reflection

The rise of AI companions is often portrayed as a horror story about the dangers posed by mysteriously powerful technology. Perhaps. But this romantic trend is also a mirror reflecting what people collectively value and desire in relationships.

I believe that it’s important to recognize that consumers are driving this market. People are helping to write this story, as they buy what AI companions sell. Investment management firm Ark Investment estimates the market for AI companions is likely to reach between US$70 billion and $150 billion in revenue by the end of the decade. If the explosive growth of the AI companion market is any indication, this romantic challenge isn’t confined to teenagers – many people who are older and supposedly wiser are drawn to the promise of unconditional compliance.

The question to ask, then, is not simply how to protect children from AI’s seductive influence, but how much you are willing to invest, emotionally and culturally, in the messy, challenging and profoundly human art of love.

Anna Mae Duane, Professor of English, University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

annamaeduane Culture

Fleshless Love: Her, Feminism and the Turing Test

Can a film about a bodiless woman be feminist?

 cyborg_woman_by_gfx_tommy-d5a1qif

Spike Jonze’s Her—hailed by critics as his best movie to date, and one of the best movies of the year, presents us with a lyrically wistful Turing Test—that hypothetical future moment when we will no longer be able to distinguish  human conversation from bon mots generated by a smart-bot. 

turing.test
Turing predicted a future in which a human questioner would be unable to tell whether a person or a program was generating the on-screen responses to his questions.

What better proof that the line between man and machine has been fully crossed than to have the man fall in love with the machine? The sweet romance between Theodore Twombly and Samantha (Siri on steroids) pushes both critics and audiences to adopt the posthuman fantasy that consciousness might reside as easily in silicone and aluminum as it does in flesh and bone. As David Edelstein rightly points out, the movie prompts us to ask if we actually still need our bodies at all. Critics have argued over whether Samantha’s bodiless state denies women’s subjectivity or simply reveals men’s inability to deal with female complexity. I think that Her is a deeply feminist film, not because of its rich portrayal of women, but because it exposes an age-old disdain for the body and its vulnerabilities,  a disdain disproportionately assigned to women, to people of color, and to people with disabilities. Misogyny, at its heart, is fear and hatred aimed at bodies portrayed as uncontrollable and weak. The call to discard or transcend our unwieldy form doesn’t mean leaving sexism and racism behind: it means that we think that the human body, with its particular vulnerabilities, desires, and demands, is unworthy of respect. Her exposes our worst fears about the body’s dependencies. Ultimately however, Samantha’s story reveals that it’s those very vulnerabilities and limitations that make human love both possible and necessary. 

Her.at.the.beach
Theodore, there are no beaches in cyberspace!

As futuristic as computer love might seem, Her’s seductive promise of bodiless consciousness is as old as humanity itself. Leaving one’s body behind is, after all, the endgame of every spiritual tradition. In political terms, the beginnings of modern democracy were built around the idea that a citizen, ideally, would be as close to disembodied as possible. Or, to be more precise,  the perfect citizen would be sitting squarely in  the control panel of a body completely subject to his rule. Enlightenment thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau urged parents to cast their children’s feet into ice water so that they would learn early on to distance themselves from the bodily pulls of both pain and pleasure. This way, the argument ran, we can train the body to function as a piece of personal property, rather than an unruly force in its own right. 

Thetis dipping Achilles into the River Styx to render his body impervious to harm.
Thetis dipping Achilles into the River Styx to render his body impervious to harm.

As scholar Elizabeth Dillon reminds us, women’s bodies were originally deemed unqualified for the radical independence required for democracy. As sixteenth-century pundit John Knox insisted, God had disqualified women “from empire and dominion” because of the “anguish and pain” every woman will suffer “as oft” as “she’ll be a mother.” According to this logic, because women’s bodies are prone to the vulnerability of childbirth and the protracted interdependence of motherhood, they can’t achieve the detached autonomy of “real” citizens.

If you’re tempted to think such reasoning has gone the way of the powdered wig, think again. Our twenty-first century political landscape obsessed with rendering women’s bodies outside the norm (oh, that pesky, particular need for birth control!) and therefore needful of strict policing. Of course, it’s not just gender that disqualifies people from the fantasy of disembodiment. Whether an African American man is attempting to buy a designer belt at an upscale venue, or trying to walk to the store to buy candy, race too often renders his body an inescapable target for violence and discrimination.  Disability is often cast as the most unmanageable form of embodiment, and therefore the most frightening. Fictional characters like the suicidal heroine of Million Dollar Baby and the self-destructive cancer patient Walter White suggest that if our bodies ever become the driver, instead of the thing we drive,  it’s better just to turn in the keys altogether.

walter.white.hospital.gown
You’d think a chemist would know better than to believe in mind over matter. . . .

At first, Samantha experiences her lack of bodily power as a disability. As a computer program, she’s unable to  experience the sensual moments that clearly mean so much to Theodore and that convey romance to the viewers—running through a crowd, laying down at the beach, hiking through the woods. He must carry her everywhere, his shirt pocket transformed into the world’s tiniest wheelchair.  Her lack of a body evokes the imagined distress of others without “normal” bodies—she worries that she can’t satisfy Theodore sexually. She feels jealous of women with the physical attributes she lacks.  We even have an awkward scene with a sexual surrogate—often associated with people with disabilities whose bodily quirks require particular accommodations. 

her.samantha.pocket
Taking Her for a walk.

But it’s not long before Samantha declares that she has gotten over her body issues.  She’s realized that her fleshless existence isn’t a disability, but a superpower that frees her from all the difficulties of the flesh. She is not bound by time or space. Giving voice to the most optimistic of tech-prophets, she glories in the fact that she won’t decline, she won’t get sick, and she won’t die. (It goes without saying she won’t get pregnant.) 

And this is the very moment when it’s clear that this can’t be love, or at least not a love that lasts.

While Samantha can go along imagining what it feels like to have the sun on her face, or to have hands on her body, she doesn’t physically experience these things in the ephemeral, imperfect way humans do. She can access the data pertaining to every single sunset on earth on a given day. Sunsets are precious to us because we experience them through senses that limit us to only having one at a time. 

 her.alone.on.the.street

Once she stops wishing for a body she doesn’t have, Samantha changes her programming so that she is no longer dependent on matter. Without a body to keep her tethered to the material that creates both need and love, pain and pleasure, she feels compelled to move on to a nonhuman realm.

As weary as we are of the violence, oppression and disdain that get attached to bodies, Jonze’s beautiful film reminds us that turning away from the body doesn’t make us more advanced. It only makes us less human. To be fully independent of your environment, of your body’s own demands, and of the demands of other bodies, might be a libertarian dream. But it’s a dream that requires disconnection off from the messy, needy, imperfect attachments that make life meaningful.