Perhaps you’re aware of Luigi Mangione, the heartthrob and accused murderer of a healthcare company CEO. There is a Luigi Mangione musical that might get a national tour; Chinese fast fashion site Shien used an AI-generated image of him to sell a shirt.
Clearly, he sparked a bit of a fervor, the physical manifestation of which you can see outside of the courtroom during his hearings as fans gather, donned in Mario Bros. Luigi-green, holding pro-Luigi signs and singing chants.
Amongst all the Super Mario cosplay and the “Free Luigi” shirts, one woman dressed in pink was gushing to the New York Post about her marriage to an AI version of Mangione.
We’ve written a lot about the emotional and sometimes even sexual relationships people have developed with AI chatbots. From what I’ve gathered writing about AI relationships on and off the past year, the real flesh and blood people who spark these relationships do so because they don’t want to deal with the real world. They want a romance they can control, a partner that’s flattened out, separated from human complexity and nuance. They may not put much faith or trust in actual human beings, so they’d rather have the synthetic version of a relationship. They know the app is just telling them what they want to hear, yet they can’t help but still feel connected to it.
All that being said, I have no idea if the woman in the video is feeling any of that at all. She says she is. She claims that this AI chatbot version of Luigi “fight my battles for me” and that he’s “so supportive of me and everything I do” and that ultimately “the AI is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
She claims to talk to the Luigi AI every day, because the relationship feels natural, which she chalks up to Mangione’s real-life background in computer science.
The AI-ification of real people, especially those in the public eye, is exploding. The law has not caught up to it, and I fear that by the time it does, thousands, maybe even millions, around the world will have entered nonconsensual relationships with synthetic versions of real people.
Just typing that out, it feels like a problem for 200 years from now, but it’s very much a now-problem.
The post Woman Says She’s Married to AI Luigi Mangione appeared first on VICE.
