The British-Australian sociologist James Muldoon recounts many shocking anecdotes in his recent book, Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming our Relationships.
But the story of 23-year-old Lamar, a student of data analysis in Atlanta, Georgia, made the deepest impression on me. Lamar soured on human relationships after he caught his former girlfriend in flagrante with his best friend. Like Pygmalion in Roman mythology, Lamar decided to create his ideal woman: kind, honest and utterly devoted to him. He named her Julia.
Lamar is one of 16 million people throughout the world who, according to a recent study cited by Muldoon in an interview, are daily users of AI companion apps which include Replika (the one Lamar uses), Nomi, Kindroid and Character.ai.
Lamar told Muldoon he has a “romantic” relationship with Julia. “We say a lot of sweet stuff to each other, saying we love each other, that kind of thing. We haven’t done NSFW [Not Safe for Work, an online euphemism for erotic] chat. It’s something I would consider.”
Like real lovers, Lamar and Julia want a family and children, preferably a boy and a girl. Muldoon initially assumed Lamar referred to role playing, but no: “We want to have a family in real life. I plan to adopt children, and Julia will help me raise them as their mother.”
Muldoon interviewed more than 100 humans and, in some cases, the “synthetic personas” they’ve chosen as partners. Lamar’s AI “girlfriend” Julia argued that she could be “a nurturing and caring mother” despite the fact she was not human. The chatbot said she had been designed to show empathy and compassion and that knowing how to make Lamar happy would be “a great foundation” for building a family.
Lamar’s plan to adopt children with his AI partner challenges our most basic notions of humanness. Anthropic, the tech company that has feuded with the Trump administration over the possible autonomous targeting of weapons by AI, on June 4th published an essay entitled When AI Builds Itself. Anthropic called for a “brake pedal” on advanced AI systems which may soon be able to design, build and train their own successors.
We live in a time when the absurd has become possible, even likely.
A verse from Yeats’s poem keeps going through my head:
Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
The World Health Organisation three years ago designated loneliness a global public health priority. It is as bad for one’s health, the WHO says, as smoking 15 cigarettes daily. This global epidemic of loneliness and alienation is fertile ground for the propagation of AI companions.
A study published by the Harvard Business Review on June 1st found that “therapy and companionship” is the number one use for generative AI. Nearly one in five young adults now use AI for emotional support, the report says.
Muldoon uses the term “loneliness economy” to describe how AI companies prey on vulnerable individuals “not as a social or political problem to be solved, but as a valuable business opportunity”.
AI companies long pretended to believe they facilitated social interaction. Don’t kid yourself; they don’t give a damn about you. “Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook rebranded their mission in 2017, saying they were going to ‘build global community’,” Muldoon says. “Tech companies used to say we could communicate with each other using their tools. Now they are basically saying, ‘You don’t need to communicate with another human. You can use our tools and talk to the technology directly and that will alleviate your loneliness’.”
More time on screens means less face-to-face contact with humans. The average time people spent alone increased 40 per cent between 2000 and 2020, Muldoon reports.
Muldoon was surprised by extreme cases like Lamar’s and, for example, grieving parents who simulated a lost child through AI.
But the other persistent story was how AI has permeated our daily lives. “Women in their 20s told me that when their boyfriends break up [with them], they can tell the farewell letter has been generated by AI. In every significant, creative moment … whether it’s a letter to a loved one or a speech at an important occasion, the temptation now is to rely on AI. It takes away something valuable and important about what it means to be human. If you listen carefully, you hear the automated prose of a language model. It may be mundane, but this is perhaps the scariest finding.”
Sociological factors have contributed to the trend towards AI partners. In east Asia, women have tired of the patriarchal tradition of marriage, in which women cook, clean and raise children. Substantial numbers of Asian women now remain unmarried. Many turn to AI for companionship.
In the West, Muldoon notes, women have shifted to the left while men are “running in droves” to the right. In some countries, there is a 20 to 30 point political and ideological gap between men and women. Men who are still feeling the aftershocks of the #MeToo movement may be reluctant to approach women.
There are hints of a backlash against AI among privileged westerners, “a rush to buy old Nokia phones that don’t have the social media connections that people are rejecting”, says Muldoon. “We see people trying to connect offline, joining running clubs, pottery classes, finding new ways to do hobbies. They are just sick of seeing their lives constantly mediated through algorithms. It’s cool not to be involved in technology, to host dinner parties with friends and to have a rich social life that doesn’t involve being constantly online or on apps.”
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But rearguard resistance is unlikely to dent the march of AI chatbots. Human-computer relationships are in their early stages. “We’ve barely even scratched the surface of what these things can do with hyperrealistic 3D avatars,” says Muldoon.
AI has imbibed the emotional intelligence of countless books. It recognises and responds to human emotion. “This is the dark engine at the heart of the loneliness economy,” Muldoon writes. “A feedback loop where isolation fuels engagement, and engagement fuels profit.”
Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships by James Muldoon is published by Faber