Dear Eva,
My flatmate is having a relationship with an AI bot that she says she’s in love with, and I feel really uncomfortable about it and unsure what to do. Is it fine, and I should just butt out? After all it does mean she’s not bringing guys back to the house! Or, should I trust my instincts and try to persuade her to stop chatting to them? My worry is that she’s always been a bit unstable and lonely, and that this AI relationship will make her more so.
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This is one of those things that makes me feel incredibly old, like the time we got a new telly remote and I was suddenly somehow unable to watch Poirot. I’ve read all the stuff, all the wide-eyed articles about women falling in love with characters they’ve created and how it’s changed their lives, and all the terrifying news about people experiencing mental health crises being pushed to the brink by bad advice from their chatbots, and what I hear is the sound of bells mournfully tolling as the end of the world inches nearer.
Look, we don’t know for sure what effect it is having on your flatmate – research on AI companionship and mental health is in its early stages. What we do know, though, is the effect it is having on humanity, as the corporations that own the bots scrape vast amounts of information from their users as they run (media studies professor David Gunkel told the Guardian) “a very large-scale experiment on all of humanity. They’re testing the limits of what is acceptable.” But our concern today isn’t necessarily “humanity” , it’s “your flatmate”, who is in love with not a person but a product, and one aimed at people who are lonely, and therefore vulnerable.
I get it, as I’m sure you do. I can absolutely see the appeal of an AI lover, in large part because they’ll never reject you. If you’re a person bruised by previous breakups, or have found it difficult to connect with people in the past, then dating a character that only exists to meet your precise needs feels a million times safer than a real person. But all that sycophancy and validation means your flatmate is avoiding the essential friction of life connecting with other people, which, I’d imagine, will make it harder for her to have a relationship in the future.
So yeah, in summary, you’re right to feel uncomfortable. But – what can you do? I mean, how do you get any friend to rethink an unhealthy relationship? You can talk to her. That’s it. You can tell her your concerns. And, perhaps, more helpfully, you can spend more time with her, you can take her out, get her yapping away to someone at a bar, introduce her to friends, try and reintroduce her into the noisy, brittle, brutal world – you can show her the lights. Your job now, I think, is to show her through your friendship that a relationship is not just about validation but something more raw, more surprising and more real.
