Your Virtual Friend Is Real. Just Dead.

What the psychology and experience of grief can teach us about the future of human-AI relationships.

“Your virtual friend isn’t real,” scream the headlines. Fully one quarter of the world’s card-carrying journalists and magazine editors seem to have only now discovered AI-animated virtual friends, and they’re scrambling to interview human users. The more pathetic the user appears, the better. The urge to use ridicule to insulate both oneself and the reader from technological progress is as strong as it has ever been.

In a trivial sense, the headlines are true. Virtual friends are AI. They are not living, breathing Homo sapiens. So much, so obvious. Hit print and let’s go to the pub.

My retort, standard since I started writing about artificial intimacy, is that artificial intelligence is coming for your friendships, advancing on many fronts at once. It is coming even for your most intimate friendships; hell, especially for those.

I would like, here, to offer some respite to the overworked case studies who have fallen hard for their Replikas or Nomis. I even have a hall-pass for those of you who think you subscribe to ChatGPT for work but spend untallied hours chatting with an LLM “out of curiosity”. Instead, I’d like to consider what we can learn from the dead, and from those they leave behind.

WHY HUMANS GRIEVE

When we lose somebody, they leave a very real hole in our lives. A hole that punctures our sense of self. Psychologists have shown that the process of becoming closer to another person is one of integrating our sense of them into our sense of self. Intimacy, the closest kind of relationship, is the highest level of integration. We expand, psychologically, as our sense of the other grows. “Them” becomes “us.”

So when an intimate partner dies, or leaves us for a more attractive upgrade, or simply turns out to have obnoxious politics, whatever, it really hurts. The injury isn’t a mere absence, but a loss of that part of our psychological self that we had built for them. As with any injury, we need time and care to recover. But in the case of losing a person, we call that recovery “grief.”

The extent of our grief depends on how much injury we have sustained to our sense of self. When recounting their memories of the lost person, people with “complicated grief” — a persistent sense of loss that lasts longer and is more debilitating than typical grief — report more ‘self-defining’ memories than do people with more typical grief.