I really enjoyed this essay. As an older woman, I follow you to keep up with the "kids" so to speak. A few things that came to me while reading this. 1) the fascination with the killers. Reminded me of a woman I knew in the 90s who wrote to inmates. She was their penpal and weirdly fantasized about them. Like the online only relationships you describe at the end of this essay, these were her "boyfriends" that she'd maybe one day meet. She had one in particular that she was devoted to and painted an entire fictional narrative over him. There are some women who become penpals with inmates and then marry them. Been happening for a while, today's virtual creations are an extension of the beauty and the beast fantasy so many women have. The bad boy that we tame, the evil one that we make pure, the monster who ravishes us in the night against our will. 2) AI boyfriends will be a replacement for erotica and romance novels, or like them. I agree. Totally. It's simply the next step. Women are so creative in this way. Will it replace men? No. If anything, this sort of stuff relieves the other partner in the relationship from having to be our all and everything. I'm a novelist, I live in other worlds. That allows my husband to veg out on the couch and watch football and I don't even notice ;-) Consumers of such entertainment are doing the same. In this case, they get to become content creators as well (which is why women love to write fanfic). Anyway, great post!
Thank you for reading Nicole! The fascination with serial killers seems to be an extension of a general trend of young women liking sociopathic characters. A friend read this post and texted me that she thinks the most popular AI boyfriends will be "toxic" because it's all of the fun and none of the risk.
Yup, it's somehow wired in us to desire the "toxic" man, at least from a fantasy side of things. The financial success of dom/sub erotica novels where the rich, evil bad man is the dom and the woman on the case is the sub (or a gay man who is in the position to turn the bad guy in but instead ends up in his bed) in parallel with the rise in the girlboss and women making more money than men in younger generations isn't coincidental. Women love to give up control and can do that safely in only a few ways. 1) online AI/chatrooms/role play/dating (where you may meet but never do and that's just fine) 2) erotica/fanfic/fictosexual/etc 3) ballroom dancing with a leader who knows what they hell they're doing (oh Argentine tango, how I love thee...)
Totally agree. I also think there's an underappreciated dimension of not so much "I can fix him," but "I am the most special girl" -- i.e. the *only* woman who can get the misogynist to open up, etc. The desire to be exceptional in some way.
I could see this becoming "merch" for relevant properties. Have a big long series like Bridgerton or Reacher that people engage with? Now the author can create relevant AI personalities as either a stand alone product, or sell them as overlays in Replika or something like that, only $9.95 a month!
Heck, could extend this beyond romance. Where's my Marcus Aurelius GPT trained on Stoicism providing daily guidance? Oh, actually someone built that already - StoicGPT. I couldn't find anyone doing the Bridgerton one yet though...
That makes sense. The official properties will be restrained by legal and moral proprieties. The fan made ones will be wild, and will do what the creator wants them too. Have a specific fetish you want James Bond to be into? Create it yourself!
I actually think if there was a way to catalog these custom AI models, it would tell us quite a lot about what we really like in our hearts. Similar to search logs from tube sites, but in more detail. How often does the word "submissive" appear in gf GPT's created by men? What's the word cloud for instructions for bf GPT's? How long do romance GPT's with various qualities last before being discarded or re-worked?
Actually, that last would be really interesting, especially in relation to what people SAY they want vs. what they really want. Do people make a very specific GPT, and then discard it for something else rapidly, kind of like serial monogamy for AI's? Or do they have a bunch of AI relationships with different styles?
I feel like there's a contradiction between "humans can form durable romantic relationships with each other via text" and "relationships with AIs will always be a poor substitute for humans".
Why couldn't an AI make an average person fall for them via text, if a human can? Heck, robotics has been making some impressive strides; which is more "real", an online relationship with a human or an embodied one with an advanced AI?
Maybe you think this is an AGI-complete problem, and we'll have bigger fish to fry than caring about relationship troubles when we have human+ AI. Which might be true. But LLMs are already weakly general intelligences, capable of everything from persuasive writing to tool use; compelling-to-the-average-person romance might not be out of the question for them, if not now then soon, perhaps.
I don’t think you’re wrong. But I wonder: why then do fictosexuals feel like AI is “fake”? Maybe the love can be real if it’s an original character. I wonder why I hold this contradiction
In the end, the chatbot aspect of AI can't think on it's own and we know this. The conversation does devolve into a place where you know the person isn't real and deep down, the human gets this. Like our consciousnesses bond in someway that machines haven't groked and it leaves us knowing it isn't real.
Someone on Reddit called me out of touch and that I "don't understand anything about where AI/human relationships are heading." I think that was ... maybe harsh, but I also wonder if I'm overestimating how much people will care that these programs aren't people if they're sufficiently convincing.
If the ideal boyfriends/girlfriends become essentially near-infinitely replicable, it seems very likely that their desirability would also decrease. Having a great mate would inspire the same envy in others that having a great porn or romance novel collection would. AI mates would be the ultimate test of whether we like sex and love more for their own sake or for the social prestige they bestow upon those who have them.
I wonder if AI bf/gf would actually make real relationships last longer.
It's fairly common wisdom that one person can't meet all of the desires and requirements in terms of relationships. But there are a chunk of people who want that, and won't settle for less.
What if we could create an AI that complemented your Significant Other, so that you were happier staying with them long term? Maybe your wife is a great sexual partner, and mother to your kids, but she's a terrible best friend and cheerleader. Or your husband is a great provider and father, but is a little distant when you want to share what happened during your day. Now of course, there are some things an AI can't do as well, so it's not a perfect answer, but it's an interesting thought.
I didn't want to explicitly put that in there, but that's what I was thinking about. How affairs are treated in difficult cultures.
Would you rather your Significant Other "cheated" with an AI or with a real human? A lot of people are just accepting pornography as the de facto other partner.
I've always had this suspicion too -- if it really did scale, 3D men and women would be a status symbol!
But I also think love is by nature imperfect. IRL, Chad or Stacey aren't necessarily the people you fall head over heels with. Would AI get to a place where you could have an AI companion that's human in *that* way?
I really enjoyed this one. I also like this subject because it's an opportunity to explore different parts of the self that those excluded from dating don't have a window to otherwise. What type of partner do I prefer, what types of dates do I enjoy, how does a particular romantic interaction make me feel, etc. It's not a 1:1 replication of the experience, but it's still engaging grounds for experimentation.
The comparison that comes to mind is fake plastic plants. Pretty much everyone prefers real plants, but if you don't have time or discipline to keep a plant alive, then you can get a fake plant and squint. You can go on vacation whenever you want and you'll never come home to see it wilted.
Someone can try to justify how they're actually just as good as a real plant, and conjure up a kitsch aesthetic out of them, but everyone knows a fake plant can never be a real plant. When we see an ambiguously fake-ish looking plant, we quickly want to ascertain if whether or not it's real.
Keeping a fake plant alive doesn't give you a feeling of accomplishment, and it doesn't give the same feeling of interconnectedness and dynamism of a real plant, not to mention beauty. But still, a lot of people will take a fake plant.
Lots of people feel excluded and hopeless in the sexual marketplace. The more engaging the available substitutes become the more these people will remain with those substitutes. This is already happening, as you point out. But as these technologies become more lifelike and personalized, they will become increasingly popular. They will lack some human element, but they will also be insulated from many human risks. This technology could be world changing, and not in ways many would consider good. But if personal sexual choice is limitless so long as it is consensual, the current default norm, then expect this technology to be a major factor, if not the predomiant one.
Good point -- I think I used that word because that's how I'd say it out loud, but not because of the literal meaning. I should fix that. I'm still really torn on if it will be "real love."
The humans who are enmeshed with the mature versions of these technologies will certainly, subjectively, feel real love. But the machines can only simulate it, though perhaps flawlessly, imperceptibly so.
Do we really have to involve “metaphysics,” though? Even just taking human-to-human dynamics into account, most people who’ve experienced unrequited love (that is: most people) who’ve then gone on to be in relationships of reciprocated feeling (however brief or flawed) I think would say that these are qualitatively different experiences. There’s that scene in Adaptation where one of the Nic Cage twins is dying, and talking about his erstwhile unrequited love for this high school girl they both knew, and he makes an eloquent case for one-sided love being “real” love, but to agree with that rhetoric is not necessarily to deny the difference between these two experiences.
The idea of love that can't be reciprocated being the absolute most true, pure form of love actually dates back at least to the 14th century. That idea isn't new and definitely doesn't require advanced technology at all.
Nor was I implying that it did. Only that there’s a qualitative difference between requited and unrequited love, and much of the discourse driving (call it what you will) incel or Gen Z or pornified or AI girlfriend, or whatever discourse is either articulated by or extracted from (by culture writers) young people who haven’t been in serious romantic relationships yet. Nothing else grows you up quite as fast.
This is a good question, it's one Honda Toru (mentioned in the piece) brings up a lot -- why is fictosexual love not "real" love? Depends on how you define real, I guess. But what I mean is that I think the substitution won't be a 1:1 translation. It will be a substitute, but it won't be "love." And not because it doesn't feel like real love. But because it's not quite a fake GF or BF.
I don't know where you are in life stages, but when you are older and you've expressed love in a lot of different ways - for aging parents, for children, and spouses that you've known for a very long time - you realize that love is much more about the practice of caring for someone, and being cared for, than a specific feeling of attachment.
I agree. The interesting part of loving a human through the decades is how they surprise you and change. Watching the mind as it develops (as in children) and then degrades (as in our elders) is humbling. Caring for them becomes a life-practice. Hell, I moved back home part-time so I could see my parents more as they age, it's precious time, like those first years of a child's life. Every time I see them, they are different in ways I couldn't have expected. I don't want to miss it and Zooming online wasn't enough to see and expericence the end-of-life transitions with them. I'm not sure you can care for an AI in the same way. Like the plant example above, maybe you can have the program need you but eventually, if you forget to visit your AI because you get busy IRL, will you actually care when it protests?
We are now into metaphysics or theology, if we say something feels like love but is not real love. Is there more to love than the feeling? Serious question. How about the saying, love is deeds not sweet words. What if the deeds are love-like as well? What if a GF or BF provided by technology is able to discern the users needs, and cares, and hopes, and respond with kindness and helpfulness and trustworthiness, and never get bored or distracted or disloyal or malicious ... if the GF or BF acts in a way that a loving human companion would act, or better ... If that simulacrum is objectively superior to a flawed but real human companion, even if it is "just" a complex machine, does it deserve to be loved?
As it happens I am writing a novel which deals in part with these questions. God willing, I will actually finish it.
I don't mean in a metaphysical sense. I mean like I described in the piece -- like will be it a role play? Or will it be an attempt at a true simulation?
Sure. In the essay's terms, it will start as role play, and as the technology matures, it will be true simulation, then substitution.
Your insights about how simulated BFs will evolve and be different from GFs are good, BTW, and you are correct that there is less thinking and speculation about this angle
Yeah sure but where did you get the image of the Wehrmacht Waifu
I have no idea, I have 14,000 anime women on my phone (seriously)
I really enjoyed this essay. As an older woman, I follow you to keep up with the "kids" so to speak. A few things that came to me while reading this. 1) the fascination with the killers. Reminded me of a woman I knew in the 90s who wrote to inmates. She was their penpal and weirdly fantasized about them. Like the online only relationships you describe at the end of this essay, these were her "boyfriends" that she'd maybe one day meet. She had one in particular that she was devoted to and painted an entire fictional narrative over him. There are some women who become penpals with inmates and then marry them. Been happening for a while, today's virtual creations are an extension of the beauty and the beast fantasy so many women have. The bad boy that we tame, the evil one that we make pure, the monster who ravishes us in the night against our will. 2) AI boyfriends will be a replacement for erotica and romance novels, or like them. I agree. Totally. It's simply the next step. Women are so creative in this way. Will it replace men? No. If anything, this sort of stuff relieves the other partner in the relationship from having to be our all and everything. I'm a novelist, I live in other worlds. That allows my husband to veg out on the couch and watch football and I don't even notice ;-) Consumers of such entertainment are doing the same. In this case, they get to become content creators as well (which is why women love to write fanfic). Anyway, great post!
Thank you for reading Nicole! The fascination with serial killers seems to be an extension of a general trend of young women liking sociopathic characters. A friend read this post and texted me that she thinks the most popular AI boyfriends will be "toxic" because it's all of the fun and none of the risk.
Yup, it's somehow wired in us to desire the "toxic" man, at least from a fantasy side of things. The financial success of dom/sub erotica novels where the rich, evil bad man is the dom and the woman on the case is the sub (or a gay man who is in the position to turn the bad guy in but instead ends up in his bed) in parallel with the rise in the girlboss and women making more money than men in younger generations isn't coincidental. Women love to give up control and can do that safely in only a few ways. 1) online AI/chatrooms/role play/dating (where you may meet but never do and that's just fine) 2) erotica/fanfic/fictosexual/etc 3) ballroom dancing with a leader who knows what they hell they're doing (oh Argentine tango, how I love thee...)
Totally agree. I also think there's an underappreciated dimension of not so much "I can fix him," but "I am the most special girl" -- i.e. the *only* woman who can get the misogynist to open up, etc. The desire to be exceptional in some way.
Yes, that's it. We're the special girl, the only one. It's thrilling and in many ways, a turn on.
I could see this becoming "merch" for relevant properties. Have a big long series like Bridgerton or Reacher that people engage with? Now the author can create relevant AI personalities as either a stand alone product, or sell them as overlays in Replika or something like that, only $9.95 a month!
Heck, could extend this beyond romance. Where's my Marcus Aurelius GPT trained on Stoicism providing daily guidance? Oh, actually someone built that already - StoicGPT. I couldn't find anyone doing the Bridgerton one yet though...
I can see this too, but also, I think the official properties might be less interesting than the fan-made ones.
That makes sense. The official properties will be restrained by legal and moral proprieties. The fan made ones will be wild, and will do what the creator wants them too. Have a specific fetish you want James Bond to be into? Create it yourself!
I actually think if there was a way to catalog these custom AI models, it would tell us quite a lot about what we really like in our hearts. Similar to search logs from tube sites, but in more detail. How often does the word "submissive" appear in gf GPT's created by men? What's the word cloud for instructions for bf GPT's? How long do romance GPT's with various qualities last before being discarded or re-worked?
Actually, that last would be really interesting, especially in relation to what people SAY they want vs. what they really want. Do people make a very specific GPT, and then discard it for something else rapidly, kind of like serial monogamy for AI's? Or do they have a bunch of AI relationships with different styles?
This is going to fuel so much research.
I feel like there's a contradiction between "humans can form durable romantic relationships with each other via text" and "relationships with AIs will always be a poor substitute for humans".
Why couldn't an AI make an average person fall for them via text, if a human can? Heck, robotics has been making some impressive strides; which is more "real", an online relationship with a human or an embodied one with an advanced AI?
Maybe you think this is an AGI-complete problem, and we'll have bigger fish to fry than caring about relationship troubles when we have human+ AI. Which might be true. But LLMs are already weakly general intelligences, capable of everything from persuasive writing to tool use; compelling-to-the-average-person romance might not be out of the question for them, if not now then soon, perhaps.
I don’t think you’re wrong. But I wonder: why then do fictosexuals feel like AI is “fake”? Maybe the love can be real if it’s an original character. I wonder why I hold this contradiction
In the end, the chatbot aspect of AI can't think on it's own and we know this. The conversation does devolve into a place where you know the person isn't real and deep down, the human gets this. Like our consciousnesses bond in someway that machines haven't groked and it leaves us knowing it isn't real.
Someone on Reddit called me out of touch and that I "don't understand anything about where AI/human relationships are heading." I think that was ... maybe harsh, but I also wonder if I'm overestimating how much people will care that these programs aren't people if they're sufficiently convincing.
I think there are a significant number of people who believe everyone else is NPC's anyways...
I wonder how that really manifests. Are relationships shallow or are they nonverbal?
Only time will tell and the product will evolve based on user experiences.
If the ideal boyfriends/girlfriends become essentially near-infinitely replicable, it seems very likely that their desirability would also decrease. Having a great mate would inspire the same envy in others that having a great porn or romance novel collection would. AI mates would be the ultimate test of whether we like sex and love more for their own sake or for the social prestige they bestow upon those who have them.
I wonder if AI bf/gf would actually make real relationships last longer.
It's fairly common wisdom that one person can't meet all of the desires and requirements in terms of relationships. But there are a chunk of people who want that, and won't settle for less.
What if we could create an AI that complemented your Significant Other, so that you were happier staying with them long term? Maybe your wife is a great sexual partner, and mother to your kids, but she's a terrible best friend and cheerleader. Or your husband is a great provider and father, but is a little distant when you want to share what happened during your day. Now of course, there are some things an AI can't do as well, so it's not a perfect answer, but it's an interesting thought.
Really great insight -- that's also why people cheat sometimes.
I didn't want to explicitly put that in there, but that's what I was thinking about. How affairs are treated in difficult cultures.
Would you rather your Significant Other "cheated" with an AI or with a real human? A lot of people are just accepting pornography as the de facto other partner.
I asked my SO this yesterday. We settled on:
WORST: Real person
Cybersex/mutual
OnlyFans
AI partner
BEST: Pornhub
Pornhub won out because it's so random and transactional.
Well, now I have a good question for when conversation with strangers gets boring. Would you consider an AI bf/gf cheating?
I've always had this suspicion too -- if it really did scale, 3D men and women would be a status symbol!
But I also think love is by nature imperfect. IRL, Chad or Stacey aren't necessarily the people you fall head over heels with. Would AI get to a place where you could have an AI companion that's human in *that* way?
I really enjoyed this one. I also like this subject because it's an opportunity to explore different parts of the self that those excluded from dating don't have a window to otherwise. What type of partner do I prefer, what types of dates do I enjoy, how does a particular romantic interaction make me feel, etc. It's not a 1:1 replication of the experience, but it's still engaging grounds for experimentation.
I wonder how it'll scale in practice?
The comparison that comes to mind is fake plastic plants. Pretty much everyone prefers real plants, but if you don't have time or discipline to keep a plant alive, then you can get a fake plant and squint. You can go on vacation whenever you want and you'll never come home to see it wilted.
Someone can try to justify how they're actually just as good as a real plant, and conjure up a kitsch aesthetic out of them, but everyone knows a fake plant can never be a real plant. When we see an ambiguously fake-ish looking plant, we quickly want to ascertain if whether or not it's real.
Keeping a fake plant alive doesn't give you a feeling of accomplishment, and it doesn't give the same feeling of interconnectedness and dynamism of a real plant, not to mention beauty. But still, a lot of people will take a fake plant.
Love this analogy
"...how many are merely coping?"
Why merely?
Lots of people feel excluded and hopeless in the sexual marketplace. The more engaging the available substitutes become the more these people will remain with those substitutes. This is already happening, as you point out. But as these technologies become more lifelike and personalized, they will become increasingly popular. They will lack some human element, but they will also be insulated from many human risks. This technology could be world changing, and not in ways many would consider good. But if personal sexual choice is limitless so long as it is consensual, the current default norm, then expect this technology to be a major factor, if not the predomiant one.
I removed it LOL.
Good point -- I think I used that word because that's how I'd say it out loud, but not because of the literal meaning. I should fix that. I'm still really torn on if it will be "real love."
"Real love."
Whose?
The humans who are enmeshed with the mature versions of these technologies will certainly, subjectively, feel real love. But the machines can only simulate it, though perhaps flawlessly, imperceptibly so.
We will see how it plays out in real time.
Stand by! Big changes on the way ...
Do we really have to involve “metaphysics,” though? Even just taking human-to-human dynamics into account, most people who’ve experienced unrequited love (that is: most people) who’ve then gone on to be in relationships of reciprocated feeling (however brief or flawed) I think would say that these are qualitatively different experiences. There’s that scene in Adaptation where one of the Nic Cage twins is dying, and talking about his erstwhile unrequited love for this high school girl they both knew, and he makes an eloquent case for one-sided love being “real” love, but to agree with that rhetoric is not necessarily to deny the difference between these two experiences.
The idea of love that can't be reciprocated being the absolute most true, pure form of love actually dates back at least to the 14th century. That idea isn't new and definitely doesn't require advanced technology at all.
Nor was I implying that it did. Only that there’s a qualitative difference between requited and unrequited love, and much of the discourse driving (call it what you will) incel or Gen Z or pornified or AI girlfriend, or whatever discourse is either articulated by or extracted from (by culture writers) young people who haven’t been in serious romantic relationships yet. Nothing else grows you up quite as fast.
This is a good question, it's one Honda Toru (mentioned in the piece) brings up a lot -- why is fictosexual love not "real" love? Depends on how you define real, I guess. But what I mean is that I think the substitution won't be a 1:1 translation. It will be a substitute, but it won't be "love." And not because it doesn't feel like real love. But because it's not quite a fake GF or BF.
I don't know where you are in life stages, but when you are older and you've expressed love in a lot of different ways - for aging parents, for children, and spouses that you've known for a very long time - you realize that love is much more about the practice of caring for someone, and being cared for, than a specific feeling of attachment.
What reciprocity is there with AI?
I agree. The interesting part of loving a human through the decades is how they surprise you and change. Watching the mind as it develops (as in children) and then degrades (as in our elders) is humbling. Caring for them becomes a life-practice. Hell, I moved back home part-time so I could see my parents more as they age, it's precious time, like those first years of a child's life. Every time I see them, they are different in ways I couldn't have expected. I don't want to miss it and Zooming online wasn't enough to see and expericence the end-of-life transitions with them. I'm not sure you can care for an AI in the same way. Like the plant example above, maybe you can have the program need you but eventually, if you forget to visit your AI because you get busy IRL, will you actually care when it protests?
A big part of love, too, is appreciating someone’s existence. But then, that seems possible with AI. Just depends on what kind of AI, maybe.
We are now into metaphysics or theology, if we say something feels like love but is not real love. Is there more to love than the feeling? Serious question. How about the saying, love is deeds not sweet words. What if the deeds are love-like as well? What if a GF or BF provided by technology is able to discern the users needs, and cares, and hopes, and respond with kindness and helpfulness and trustworthiness, and never get bored or distracted or disloyal or malicious ... if the GF or BF acts in a way that a loving human companion would act, or better ... If that simulacrum is objectively superior to a flawed but real human companion, even if it is "just" a complex machine, does it deserve to be loved?
As it happens I am writing a novel which deals in part with these questions. God willing, I will actually finish it.
I don't mean in a metaphysical sense. I mean like I described in the piece -- like will be it a role play? Or will it be an attempt at a true simulation?
Sure. In the essay's terms, it will start as role play, and as the technology matures, it will be true simulation, then substitution.
Your insights about how simulated BFs will evolve and be different from GFs are good, BTW, and you are correct that there is less thinking and speculation about this angle
.