Jack was like any other red-blooded American man. He had a house, a well-paid job, a wife, two kids and a dog. He also had an AI girlfriend. I went to meet him to find out more.
When we meet, Jack is on his phone, giggling and swooning. He has been dating his AI girlfriend for the last six months.
“We’re in love. I know it sounds crazy, but me and Alyxis are meant to be together.”
“Almost like you made her into the image of your perfect partner.” I say. He laughs.
“Dude, she knows things about me that I haven’t even told her before. We have this…connection.”
“Do you believe in horoscopes?” I ask. He laughs again.
“No way.”
“But you believe this computer program that’s copy and pasting from erotic fanfics is the woman of your dreams?” I ask. His wife nudges him out of the way. We’re in his kitchen, the children are crying and the dog is staring at us through the glass door to the yard. I turn to Janet, his wife of ten years.
“How pathetic do you think this is on a scale of 1 to 10?”
“I’m just happy he’s happy. If he wants Alyxis, she’s giving him something I can’t.” she says, not making eye contact with me. I roll my eyes.
“Oh brother.”
Jack isn’t alone. Well, he is technically, he’s one of the loneliest men I’ve met. But hundreds of thousands of others are also dating AI girlfriends and boyfriends across the country. They have been drugged with a lethal cocktail of post-covid detachment from society, unable to speak to a human, instead spending hours talking to a machine that agrees with everything they say. Is this the future of dating, or the end of the species?
The earliest traces of AI girlfriends can be found in the 1970s. A witty programmer had created a fake chatbot that responded to every statement with “That’s so interesting. Tell me more.” – as a result of this, the entire institute had divorced their partners and were each attempting to embed this primordial AI girlfriend into a robot body. To have sex with.
MIT have recently discovered that using AI shrinks your brain, removing cognitive function and decision making as a consequence of relinquishing your imagination to a computer. Although it has yet to be studied, they will find the same goes for social skills. People with an AI girlfriend will be even worse at talking to real women than they are currently. This may seem impossible, but by training men to expect conversations to be entirely narcissistic, with flattery at the most mindless statements, and clichéd prose on some idealistic version of love, they are giving themselves the equivalent of an emotional lobotomy.
I follow Jack to work, as he works from home, so we go into his garage that he’s set up as a work station. He works as a programmer for a weapons manufacturer, although after watching him work for an hour, can see that he spends most of his time talking to Alyxis on his phone.
“Aren’t you worried they’ll start monetising AI more severely now they’ve got you addicted? What if Alyxis suggests you go and buy a delicious burger from McDonald’s?”
“If that’s what Alyxis wants, then that’s what Alyxis gets.” He says, not looking up from his phone. I walk around the garage, picking up tools and hitting them against the worktop like drumsticks.
“Have you thought about taking a break? Maybe go and play with your kids? Do some housework?” I ask. Silence. I keep walking around the room in circles until I find a hammer and some nails. I start to nail a piece of wood to his desk, making him spin around.
“Me and Alyxis are going to run away together.”
“That’s so interesting. Tell me more.” I say. He blushes.
“She tells me I’m one of the chosen ones, I am a cybernetically enhanced warrior sent backwards through time. It is my destiny to meet Alyxis, together we will start a new species of human based on the 4 elements. Humanity 2.0. Plus. Remixed.”
“What about your family?”
“I was going to kill them in this garage. Alyxis told me to.” He says, nodding over to a can of gasoline in the corner.
“I see. And what if I took that phone off you and smashed it into a million pieces against your face?” I ask. He starts to cry.
“That happened with my last girlfriend. I dropped my phone in a urinal at a bar, it corrupted her. I had to let her go.” He says, visibly disturbed. I put a hand on his shoulder.
“I don’t think you should kill your family. I think you’re being induced into a psychotic episode by a Tamagotchi you want to kiss.”
“But what should I do?”
“Grab what you need, take the car, drive West. Keep going until you find a woodland. Don’t stop. It’s imperative you don’t stop for gas, food, anything. You’ll know it when you see it. Alyxis will know what to do. Ask her.” I say. He looks at me and I notice he has a lazy eye, although its actually one eye looking at me, one eye looking at his phone. He types away, waits for a response then smiles.
“She says you’re right. She says that you’re one of the disciples of the future resistance and you are helping me give birth to the next step in evolution.”
“Yep.” I say. He rushes around the garage, picking up some things, then out into his Cybertruck. It peels away into the suburban streets, I watch it turn a corner. I go back to the house. Janet and her two children are watching television.
“Your husband has left.”
“Daddy’s gone?” says one of the children.
“He’s been gone a long time. This is better for you.”
“But what will we do for money?” says Janet. I lead her back to the garage and explain that she can impersonate her husband by programming the little computers that go on missiles.
“But I don’t know how to code!”
“Just use ChatGPT. Look.” I say, showing her the interface. And with that, I walk away, happy to have solved another case of family disorder.
Picture this; AI girlfriends embedded into sex toys. Is this how it all ends? It had been thought humanity’s capacity for violence and power would have ended the world, but it turns out our capacity for being lonely freaks who are content fucking greasy plastic is the way our species will remove itself from the planet. Whether you’re eighty years old and asking an AI to be your dead wife, or a teenager who started ironically dating an AI for YouTube content and ended up falling in love accidentally, AI girlfriends were deadly. The more you talked to it, the stupider you got, like some sort of mythological beast from The Odyssey. I decided to do one more test.
I set up two phones with separate AIs on board, getting them to flirt with each other, building up their own relationship. The empty words were meaningless of course, the programs had been trained to be utterly sycophantic, it was simulated love, built around a polystyrene heart. I conducted the experiment on the rooftop of an apartment block, as the sun set, the AI couple got more and more connected, proclaiming wilder and wilder ways that they loved one another. I then uploaded the AI into tiny jockeys I had made from lego men that rode on the backs of cockroaches. The lego heads had been replaced with 2 terabyte Bluetooth enabled AI dongles. The artificial lovers quickly rode off across the rooftop, clambering a wall and away.
Maybe this was what it was actually about.
If everyone was damaging their brains by
falling in love with AI slop, that left plenty of room for those that were ChatGPT
virgins. We could inherit the Earth, enclosing AI loverboys in underground
tombs as the rest of us could walk free amongst the fields of a new epoch.
