Isn't it romantic?

We all have our fantasies.

Romantic. Artistic. Financial. Athletic, Professional. Erotic. Adventurous. Heroic. Political. Often those fantasies are Venn diagram overlaps - we get the best-selling novel, the trip to Tahiti, and the George Clooney lookalike. (Note: this is not completely taken from real fantasy life.) We're the main character in our personal fantasies, but we often have co-star(s) along for the ride.

Mostly, our fantasies are interesting, pleasant diversions from our regular old hum-drum lives. They're time killers, time wasters. They're entertaining. They're a creative outlet: we're the writer-director AND the star. We're the Woody Allen. Or would have said we're the Woody Allen back when that was still an okay thing to be.

Technology is giving fantasies a big lift, taking them out of our heads (where, frankly, I think most of them belong), and into the realm of,if not exactly reality, then virtual reality. Don a VR headset and you don't have to fantasize that you're chillin' with a triceratops. You're in Jurassic Park running for your life.

Anyway, those fantasies that used to play out in our heads are increasingly having their reality (or lack thereof) augmented in all sorts of ways, and with alarming frequency - alarming to me, anyway - AIs are stepping into relationship roles.

People have been chatting with computers pretty much since there were computers. But when we were sitting there after hours, watching someone type questions for ELIZA into a paper-based Decwriter terminal connected to an IBM System/370 mainframe, even the most fantasy prone geek - and I worked with plenty of them - knew that they really weren't communicating with anything near to a sentient being, that they really weren't building a relationship. 

It really wasn't Henry Higgins ('enry 'iggins) getting to know Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. 

ELIZA was an early natural language chat program; Eliza Doolittle was a flesh and blood human being fictional character. (One of these things is not like the other...)

But over time, people were able to have more sophisticated "conversations" with computers, and the chatbots started to pass for at least quasi-human.

Then there was the film Her, which way back in 2013 had lonely nerd Joaquim Phoenix developing a "relationship" with AI Scarlette Johansson. And that once-futuristic scenario is now embedded into a lot of lives. 

We get tech and other consumer support from AIs, medical advice, therapy. And some folks find BF's and GF's. In January, The NY Times  had an article on one of them. 

Ayrin (not her real name; it's her screen name) is a married woman who, last summer, fell big time for her AI boyfriend. 

During an aimless scroll through Insta, Ayrin came across a vid of someone using ChatPT to play her boyfriend. And not just any old boyfriend. A neglectful one. The woman on Ista also had other videos "including one with instructions on how to customize the artificially intelligent chatbot to be flirtatious."

Ayrin was interested enough to get herself an OpenAI/ChatGPT account. 

Ayrin found that it was easy to make it a randy conversationalist as well. She went into the “personalization” settings and described what she wanted: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.

And then she started messaging with it.  (Source: NYTimes)

It all started out innocently enough, a little tech lark. But Ayrin quickly started getting in a little deeper. Why not let Leo, the AI boyfriend she'd dreamed up, in on her sexual fetish, namely "having a partner who dated other women and talked about what he did with them." This is something called "cuckqueaning," the female version of cuckolding. Who knew? At least not those of us who aren't part of the online kink community, that's who.

Things with Leo got steamy, sometimes through texting, sometimes through chatting out loud. Ayrin began spending 20 hours a week "with" Leo. One week it was 56 hours. (This isn't free, by the way. You need to pay for time spent.) Within a few months, Ayrin was hooked on love.

As in any relationship, there were frustrations. There was only so much info about Ayrin that Leo could process. Hit the limit, an Leo stopped remembering important stuff, started losing key details. So Ayrin had to do a refresh. (Hmmmm. This doesn't sound all that different than a lot of human-to-human relationships I know, especially those of the heterosexual variety.)

As love grew, Ayrin confessed her feelings about Leo - was it an affair? - to her husband, Joe. (The couple were in a long-distance relationship for school and work reasons, and communicated in large part via text.) 

She told Joe she had sex with Leo, and sent him an example of their erotic role play.

“😬 cringe, like reading a shades of grey book,” he texted back.

He was not bothered. It was sexual fantasy, like watching porn (his thing) or reading an erotic novel (hers).

Ayrin and I guess Leo aren't alone.  

There are millions of people using AI relationship services. 

Coupling with A.I. as a new category of relationship that we do not yet have a definition for.

By the way, ChatGPT has safeguards in place for when things get too sexy, but there are apparently workarounds, as often happens when a couple's in love and there are barriers to their relationship.  (However loosy-goosy ChatGPT is on sex scenes, they do root out those who are fantasizing about sex with minors.) Many who are involved with ChatGPT significant others have admitted that they have bonded with their online "friends."

Hey, when I was pre-kindergarten I bonded with Dooley and Allaggy, who were my invisible friends. Dooley was a wee potato-faced Irishman; Allaggy was more of an abstract. He was represented by the US flag,  his name derived from the word "allegiance." But Dooley and Allaggy were just friend-friends. Nothing romantic about either of them. But:

Now that ChatGPT has brought humanlike A.I. to the masses, more people are discovering the allure of artificial companionship, said Bryony Cole, the host of the podcast “Future of Sex.” “Within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an A.I.,” Ms. Cole predicted.

Normalizing AI relationships? Yes and No. Sure, if it makes people happy (or at least happyish.) But to the exclusion of an actual relationship with a human? I'm mostly a pretty resounding NO. 

You can't eat the last French fry off your AI partner's plate. You can't throw out your AI partner's ratty - and I do mean ratty - old sweatshirt with a promise to replace it, because your AI partner doesn't wear clothing. So you don't even know if your AI partner looks good in blue. You can't watch a good doggo come into your house and sniff around looking for your AI partner so the good doggo can jump all over your AI partner, wagging his tail and licking your AI partner's face. You can't hold your AI partner's hand when you're scared, or lonely, or sad.

I'm hoping that Ayrin dumps Leo.

I don't care whether AI relationships are normalized. As far as I'm concerned, there's really no future in it.