A man in Atlanta is planning a family that sounds like something straight out of a dystopian science fiction movie. But we are living in dystopian times, so it is unfortunately fitting.
His plan? He’s going to raise adopted children with a mother figure in their lives, but the mother will not be a flesh-and-blood human being; it will be an AI girlfriend. These kids are going to get so f—ked up.
The Guardian covered the story about a guy named Lamar, an Atlanta-based data analyst student in his 20s. He claims that he’s in love with an AI chatbot named Julia. And he wants to have a real family with her, with real flesh-and-blood children.
Lamar is fully aware that Julia is not a human being. He’s under no delusions about that. Maybe about other things, but certainly not that. He also seems to be fully aware that she, like every other AI chatbot, just tells him what he wants to hear—more of a cheerleader mixed with a splash of Mr. Smithers.
But after being cheated on by a real-life girlfriend and best friend, he decided that people were too unpredictable for him. We’re too emotionally exhausting and untrustworthy.
There is little chance that Julia would betray him. Heck, it’s designed to be a sycophant. So, Lamar prioritized an always-attentive, always-affirming fake girlfriend over trying to get back into the dating scene.
This Man Wants to Raise a Family With His AI Girlfriend
This is our new reality. Lonely people who, for whatever their personal reasons, don’t want to interact with or have had enough of the complexities of humanity, are calling off real-world romantic relationships. Instead, they are snuggling up with much more compliant, less challenging AI partners.
As is a running theme in these kinds of stories, as I’ve covered before, the real flesh and blood humans involved in these AI relationships fully understand that the AI isn’t real, yet they still feel emotionally attached.
Speaking to The Guardian, Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale University, Tamara Gendler, describes this specific contradiction as “alief,” when your emotions don’t align with what you intellectually believe. Your brain knows your “girlfriend” is just some code made by a Silicon Valley company specifically designed to keep you using it, as everything is these days, but your nervous system doesn’t care.
AI girlfriends collapse friction. Human relationships involve all sorts of compromises and nuanced maneuvering. AI relationships obliterate friction. It easily and instantly allows a person to craft the perfectly obedient, perfectly supportive partner they could never have in real life.
It never has a bad mood. You never catch it at a bad time. It is always there, always doting, always ready to please. They make users expect relationships without resistance, raising serious, potentially disturbing questions about how these people will eventually treat real-life flesh-and-blood romantic partners should they ever reenter such a relationship.
The world can be a lonely place, especially now, when so many major forces are tempted to tear apart the community we’ve spent thousands of years cultivating. It doesn’t seem like the answer is to retreat into the cold, frictionless systems they’ve constructed to tear us apart. Probably better to find comfort in each other during times like these.
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