Freya India is the author of “Girls: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything.”
New research published by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University has found that 1 in 7 young adults in committed relationships — “seriously dating, engaged, or married” — regularly interact with romantic artificial intelligence companions. About 20 to 30 percent had experimented with one at least once. While men were somewhat more likely than women to do so, the difference was slight.
This might seem shocking, but as an older member of Generation Z, I am not surprised. To me, this was a predictable step for a generation that grew up with online pornography.
In the United States, the average age of first exposure to online pornography is 12. While researching my book, “Girls,” I was shocked by how much of this was accidental — not searched for on platforms such as Pornhub but stumbled across on apps such as Instagram and Snapchat. I was also surprised by how similar rates of exposure were for both sexes: According to a 2022 survey, 75 percent of teen boys and 70 percent of teen girls had seen pornography. Among those who watched it intentionally, 59 percent did so at least once a week. Online pornography is how many in my generation learned about sex, about men and women, years before our first relationships, sometimes years before puberty.
On these platforms, users can customize what they watch according to specific expectations. They can select exact fantasies and search for human beings as if shopping for products, browsing categories based on age, race or body type.
With AI companions, customization becomes even more extreme. Users are able to design their dream girlfriends and boyfriends: Many apps allow them to choose their companion avatar’s age, ethnicity, body type and face style. Users can also tweak their companions’ personality traits, deciding how romantic they are, how flirty, how protective.
Online pornography users often learn to be secretive, too. Hiding their habits from partners comes to seem normal, even funny. In 2014, one finalist selected for Pornhub’s first national advertising campaign played on men lying to their partners, featuring an image of a woman asking, “What are you watching?” and a man in front of his computer, answering, “Nothing.” Beneath was the caption, “Pornhub, the world’s biggest archive of nothing.”
Now young adults are hiding their AI companions, too. According to the report, more than 50 percent of young adults in relationships who interact with these bots are partly or wholly concealing their use from their partners. Around 69 percent said that it was “somewhat or extremely important” that their partners didn’t find out the extent of their interactions with AI.
Even if those partners did find out, I wouldn’t be surprised if their objections were dismissed, like concerns about pornography often were. When I was growing up, watching pornography was seen as normal among teenage boys, part of sexual development, while girls who felt uncomfortable with boys’ use were often called insecure and controlling. Feminists celebrated watching pornography as a “radical act”; sex therapists and columnists reassured that it was healthy, even claiming it could bring couples closer. In 2017, Laurie Betito, a sex therapist and the director of Pornhub’s Sexual Wellness Center, framed the rise in women watching pornography as empowerment: “Women have come forward to express their desires more openly. … they have found their voice.”
Now, I hear the same language around AI companions. Discussing the rise of friendly chatbots, virtual therapists and virtual girlfriends on a podcast last year, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said: “A lot of these things that today there might be a little bit of a stigma around … over time we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable and why the people who are doing these things are … rational.” One executive at EVA AI, a companion company, said the company wants its users to fight the “stigma” around relationships with AI avatars. And much like pornography, AI can apparently deepen intimacy and spice up our real relationships.
Fighting the stigma around pornography did not free my generation, though. My cohort and those younger than us are dating far less and having sex less than previous generations did at the same age. Fewer teenage girls say they want to get married someday than at any point in the past 30 years. Erectile dysfunction is increasingly prevalent among young men; expectations of infidelity are on the rise among young women. Meanwhile, pornography use has been associated with a higher likelihood of cheating and lower relationship quality. AI companions may have similar consequences: The Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute report that regular interaction with romantic bots is associated with a 46 percent lower likelihood of being in a stable relationship.
A generation is growing up with access to infinitely customizable, instantly available and increasingly realistic romantic bots. Let’s not ignore the potential consequences. My fear is that young people using AI companions will face the cost once they grow older — and they feel that no human will ever be enough.
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