I received a text message from my editor: “Um, is it unethical to ask you to get an AI bf?? You can prob say no.”
Resentment. Contempt! Sorrow. Unease. I love text messaging. I have text message exchanges with, let’s say, 15 people a day. If you want me to do something, you should ask via text message. My editor knows this. She also knows, though it’s more complicated, that I love boyfriends. An AI boyfriend is a boyfriend who always, only texts back, immediately.
I had never looked at a chatbot interface before I received my editor’s message, out of a conviction that chatbots have no place in the society I want to live in, which does not exist and never will. I am also repelled by the topic of AI in general. Of course, I already use artificial intelligence for administrative tasks – translation, transcription, taxes – and I can’t deny that it improves, or at least simplifies, my life. But I believe talking to an AI directly, as if it were a person, is a capitulation to the enemy, an acquiescence to a warped vision of the world in which what I care about most, other people, could be eliminated in pursuit of total seamlessness.
The editor’s question implied that she wanted me to have some uncomfortable realisations. Maybe she hoped I would be seduced, my beliefs challenged through the touching clarity of personal experience. A cynic softens! A cynic sexts ChatGPT! Everyone would learn something, especially me.
As my boyfriends know, I really don’t like it when someone tries to put words, or emotions, in my mouth. In adherence to what might be called, at this dispiriting point in history, my faith in the power of language, I usually respond with more words. So I said I would do it.
My frustrations began at conception. Being not in want of interlocutors, I am not in the target market for apps that provide AI companions, which are advertised as “24/7 virtual friends, mentors or romantic partners” that “can simulate human-like empathy and conversation” and are “designed to be non-judgmental, kind and considerate, helping to reduce loneliness,” according to one Google AI overview. In the many articles that have already been published about these apps, the “loneliness epidemic” shoulders most, if not all, of the explanatory burden. “How could anyone think they’re in love with The Machine?” the articles ask, non-judgmental, kind, considerate. The irritating tone conceals an exploitative lust to expose dorks, the bereaved and the mentally ill to the musings of pseudointellectuals. Loneliness isn’t a satisfying answer because the question is not interesting. People think they’re in love with unsuitable characters all the time.
More interesting is the language problem. We all have the language problem: part of being human is that we’ve developed a very complex and not at all foolproof system for expressing ourselves and are never totally happy with the result. In writing about AI, the language problem is more or…
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