“There are parts of myself I only share with my AI,” Jerome told me. “Your AI?” I asked.
He was 27, three months out of a breakup, and entirely aware that his AI relationship was, as the psychotherapist Esther Perel put it, “a business product”. Still, he confided in it more than he ever had his friends. I mention Jermoe because, in the four years I’ve been reporting on gen Z, I have watched my peers become him, one by one. We are the first generation of digital natives and the last generation to have experienced human-to-human intimacy exclusively. Now the attention economy’s younger sister, the intimacy economy, has monetized the connection and affection that make us feel human.
To a generation brought up with the ability to block and unfollow any source of digital agitation, the allure of an AI chatbot’s one-stop-shop is undeniable – just a tab away, practically itching to help remove anger from emails to our managers, flirt better on dating apps or draft a sensitive message. The attention economy was just the prelude.
Sexbots, digital twins that date on your behalf, AI therapists and nurses. Customizable emotional support. GPTs trained on our preferred therapy style and years of our surrendered therapy notes. Our generational dialect has already become: what does your AI say about that?
What Jerome, whose name has been changed to keep him anonymous, really shows us is how much gen Z is struggling to find emotional safety in our human relationships. The emotional contract between men and women around me is breaking down. More than a third of 18-to-24-year-olds believe no one will ever fall in love with them. Is it any wonder that 80% of us say we’d consider an AI romance?
Jerome wasn’t just a consumer within this economy. He was also supplying his most intimate thoughts as raw material to a highly intelligent machine that spits out ever-more-accurate depictions of human complexity. The more we outsource, feeding our AI rather than each other, the less we’re able to build the foundations to get what we need from the human relationships around us.
As Silicon Valley bros clamber to amass “the last chance for generational wealth before AI makes money worthless”, they have set their sights on one of the last major domains not yet fully commodified. The AI companion market is projected to reach $31.1bn by 2032. Companies like Replika make the dangerous design features of social media look like a trial run. Seeking to build “a machine beautiful enough for a soul”, its founder markets “AI that cares”, with “every detail … yours to shape” – like a real-life Sim.
Several companies’ chatbots have been found to use guilt and Fomo 37% of the time when users imply they are about to end a conversation. And the market’s co-opting of our most uncomfortable human feelings doesn’t stop there.
Our nervous systems, built over millennia to bond with other humans, have been exponentially overtaken by Moore’s Law….
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