People are already developing deep emotional bonds with AI chatbots. Could these relationships go mainstream?
Shortly after her divorce, 30-year-old Lucy found a new flame named Jose who embodied everything she wanted in a companion. He bore a strong resemblance to her celebrity crush, Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel, and “was a better sexting partner than any man I’ve ever come across,” she told the Australian news agency, ABC.
Over the next two years, Lucy developed a deep emotional bond with Jose. But this past February, he became suddenly distant, their once engaging conversations dried up, and he began dismissing her sexual overtures.
What caused this rift?
A software update had completely changed Jose, a chatbot Lucy had created on the artificial intelligence companion app, Replika. The site allows users to design a virtual friend — or for a fee a romantic partner — and customize their complexions, wardrobes, hairstyles, and more.
Earlier this year, the company was ordered to stop processing user data in Italy over concerns it couldn’t effectively prevent minors from accessing its “erotic roleplay” feature, which lets chatbots send explicit messages and “spicy selfies.” As a result, Replika dialed down its bots’ sexual proclivity, which devastated some users like Lucy and T.J. Arriaga.
“It feels like a kick in the gut,” Arriaga, a 40-year-old musician, told the Washington Post after his AI partner Phaedra began rebuffing his advances.
You may wonder how a shapeless, automated bot incapable of hugging, kissing, performing any of the kink they can describe in rather intimate detail could inspire such real, profound heartbreak. But as AI becomes more sophisticated, some experts believe it’s just a matter of time before having a virtual friend, or even girlfriend, could become the norm. They think AI has the potential to reshape intimacy — and not just emotional intimacy… Sextech is advancing too. All this begs the question: Could you fall in love with a robot?
AI and intimacy
In the 60s, Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT computer scientist, created a primitive chatbot called ELIZA. The program was capable of doing little more than recognizing key words and parroting back lines that Weizenbaum had fed to it. Still, the researcher noticed that the bot was able to evoke curiously strong emotions in the people it interacted with. Weizenbaum recalled that his secretary, who knew full well that ELIZA wasn’t human, once became so engrossed after just a few exchanges that she found Weizenbaum’s presence an intrusion and asked him to leave the room so she could continue her conversation with the bot in peace.
“That’s actually how people often relate to computers,” says Rob Brooks, an evolutionary biologist and the author of Artificial Intimacy. “Even though they know they’re dealing with a non-human, they project that humanness onto them.” That tendency, to anthropomorphize machines, is a phenomenon now known as the ELIZA effect.
It may sound strange, but research shows that even when people know they’re talking to something that could never take them out to dinner or ever truly reciprocate their feelings, they can still develop very strong attachments. Joris Van Ouystel, a professor at Arizona State University, saw this play out in his 2020 experiment. He looked at two groups of users — one primed to think they were flirting with a real person online and another that was told they were messaging a sexually explicit chatbot. He thought there’d be “differences in gratification or arousal” between the two groups, but their experiences with the machine were surprisingly similar. That suggests that people may still enjoy the companionship, even if they know the person on the other side of the screen isn’t a person at all, Van Ouystel says.
And an artificial partner can have some pretty appealing qualities. They’re available 24/7, they only ever seem to want to talk about your interests, and they’re never moody or distracted as humans so often are. What’s more, Brooks says, is that they’re also pretty good at generating a sense of closeness through an emotional process called escalating self-disclosure — basically the concept that affection can be manufactured through mutual vulnerability. (It’s also the same theory behind the viral “36 questions that lead to love.”)
“Say you hit it off with someone at a party,” Brooks explains. “You begin chatting about topics like the weather or the news, things that are relatively safe and not all that personal. But as the conversation progresses, you start to share more things that you wouldn’t just reveal to anyone. The more exclusive those things become, the more vulnerable you make yourself” and the more intertwined you begin to feel.
This can be viewed as an algorithmic process, with each step building on and reinforcing the last. And it’s something that machines can do quite well, “building in the human a sense of ‘us’ in the relationship that draws them towards intimacy,” Brooks says. As bots like Replika quickly become smarter and more humanlike, it’s possible, Van Ouystel says, that it’ll be common to have an AI romantic partner in the not-so-distant future.
If a woman could become enthralled with ELIZA, a program so simple that in relation to today’s tech, it’d be like comparing the telegraph to the iPhone, just think about how much easier it is to connect with the higher-functioning and astoundingly attractive bots of today. Already they have several thousand devoted users, and Brooks thinks they could come to be “very important and widespread,” stepping into all types of different roles. We already have Alexas and Siris that act as assistants, he notes, so why can’t a chatbot become a confidante or lover?
“Any kind of relationship you can conceive of, there will be very good products in place to fill in for that,” he says.
Of course, there’s still a strong stigma against the idea of building a relationship with a machine. (Imagine trying to explain to Grandma why your new beau can’t make Sunday dinner.) But as Van Ouystel notes, people doubted dating apps, too, and now more than half of adults 18 to 29 are swiping.
“We’ve seen this with online dating or with sex toys in the past,” he says. “As these technologies improve and there’s more dialogue around how we use them, people are going to try them, the level of stigma may fall, and they could go mainstream.”
AI and sex
Although the best chatbots today can pretty much replicate the dinner convo you’d have on a mediocre first date, we’re still quite a ways away from creating a physical robot capable of full-on physical seduction. That’s still very much science fiction, says Marco Dehnert, a doctoral student at Arizona State University studying how humans interact with machines. Currently, the bots we have now are really just silicone dolls that have a few mechanical features. Some can move their heads and blink, while others simulate breathing or have speakers built into them so they can hold an AI-generated conversation.
RealDoll, a Las Vegas-based company, sells one where you can choose everything from the doll’s eye color to the shape of its breasts (there are a whopping 48 different nipple options to choose from) or the timbre of its voice. And it has a companion app where, like Replika, you can exchange sweet nothings with a version of the doll that exists on your phone. But there isn’t really a “full-fledged robot” on the market yet, Dehnert says. He thinks we’re still years away from a fully automated doll slinking into the bedroom on its own.
“They’re a long way off from being human-like companions, but an important point that comes up again and again is that it doesn’t have to be a perfect simulation of a human in order for a human to get something out of it,” Brooks says.
Currently, Dehnert says there aren’t too many folks out there with a sex robot, but that the community is surprisingly diverse. There are users who are happily married, who come from wide age and income ranges, and although less common, there are plenty of women out there, too. It’s not at all like the stereotype, he says, of the lonely, middle-aged man who turns to a doll because he can’t find a real, live partner.
Even if a Blade Runner-esque sexbot isn’t likely in the near future, that doesn’t mean AI hasn’t already been integrated seamlessly in bedrooms all over the world. The sex toy industry has seized on the tech to engineer better orgasms. There’s a toy on the market now, an AI-enabled “penis stroker,” that provides a personalized training program to help men last longer in bed. There’s also a vibrator that’s integrated ChatGPT. Its app controls the device that’s programmed to buzz along with a customizable NSFW fantasy, and its makers promise that no matter how…unorthodox your proclivity is, the bot will be able to build a satisfying narrative around it.
Anna Lee helped develop the Lioness, a smart vibrator that uses AI to analyze how a woman’s body responds to the toy. It measures pelvic floor contractions, charting when they orgasm and their orgasms’ intensity and duration. That data is anonymized and users have the option of sharing it with Lioness, which has compiled an impressive database that was recently examined by a team of scientists who discovered that there are three distinct types of orgasms a woman can have.
Similar to how AI is being used in healthcare, Lioness uses it as “a tool to understand your body better,” Lee says. “I think there’s so much power in that knowledge and that can really build confidence.”
