Published on 12, July, 2020
Relationships and sex has been a hot topic on the forum lately but the fact remains many autistic people struggle to find romantic and sexual partners. So we have an interest in this matter because we are the likely early adopters and indeed for some of us the developers of ai girlfriends/ boyfriends.
Im not really suggesting we have a debate about whether or not ai girlfriends will become a thing. You can if you want and I will provide an argument for it in my background. I’m more interested in discussing what the impact of AI girlfriends (and boyfriends) will be on society and on us personally as autistic people.
But first some background. We need to look at history to understand the present. What have people done in the past to scratch the romantosexual itch when they can’t get a partner.
In terms of sex they say prostitution is the oldest profession in the world. That alone demonstrates many people are willing to treat sex as a product. For that matter many prostitutes pride themselves as offering ‘the girlfriend experience’ so clearly some clients value the illusion of emotional intimacy as part of the service. It's also the case that prostitutes have a disproportionate number of disabled clients, to the point where some get special accessibility equipment installed to help disabled clients access their chambers. That being the case its clear many disables people struggle to get sex and intimacy through conventional relationships and are willing to turn to prostitution to get it.
When you look at services that provide the impression of intimacy without physical sexual contact services become even more diverse. In japan and to a lesser extent the rest of the world there are rent a girlfriend services where for a fee a girl will spend time with you pretending to be your girlfriend. Go on dates with you, play the part in front of your friends and family and genuinely make present conversation and join in with the fiction that she is your girlfriend. Again its clear people value going through the motions of emotional intimacy even if they know their affections aren’t genuinely returned.
There are also online versions of this service that operate by text and email. Again something that seemed to start in japan there are offices where people spend all day sending mushy texts and emails and occasionally chatting online. Again pretending to be a girlfriend. So its clear that physical contact isn’t essential for all people to still feel some benefit from these sorts of services.
Indeed actual online relationships are not all that rare. People can and do meet through online chatrooms and forums and start long term pen pal style romances. More recently online 3D environments like second life and VRChat have allowed people to interact through avatars in a virtual world. If they have a vr headset and motion tracking gear they can physically walk with other users, look at them in the first person. See physical contact between their virtual bodies. In VRChat users talk of the phantom scene. The psychosomatic sensation of touch some people get by watching their virtual bodies being touched. In these places people can and do date, do speed dating, hook up in virtual night clubs. I’m told there is even virtual online prostitution.
Meanwhile VR porn has become quite popular. In particular VR porn often now interacts with telidildonincs. Computerized sex toys that sync with the porn. Such toys can be operated remotely by a partner. Cam Girls also often set them up so that people who make donations to their online sex shows can take control of these toys for a period of time. It seems very likely that these toys can and will be linked up to online VR worlds like VRChat. They are already used with interactive VR porn games. From these we can ascertain that people can and are interested in sexual activity facilitated by computerized sextoys.
This is by no means the only form of sexual activity with non-human objects that people integrate into their sex lives or substitute for conventional sexual encounters. Sex dolls are almost as old as the household use of latex. There existence alone demonstrates that physical contact with a non human humanoid doesn’t have to include their movement, conversation and responsiveness for it to appeal to some people. Indeed some people leave their sex dolls sat around in their homes and talk to them as if they were people. There has been interest recently in turning sex dolls into set robots and a few primitive sex robots are on the market although they have limited capacity for movement, usually only the face and head, and the ai can be quite primitive. What this demonstrated is that there is a market, a demand, even if small, for a physical sexual ‘partner’ you can have a conversation with.
Now we turn to the recent explosion in AI. Modern AI chat bots like character.ai allow you to ‘train’ an AI to have a particular person and identity. These AI chat bots already naturally engage in sexual or romantic conversation from time to time to the point where some services have attempted to ‘lobotomise’ them to prevent them from producing sexual responses, often making their conversation less realistic in the process. The AI chat bot service Replika that provided a 3D talking head on your smartphone formerly marketed its bots capability of responding as a person's ideal romantic or sexual partner and its ability to engage in erotic conversation as key features. It’s since disabled these features much like character.ai prompting a considerable level of complaints.
Computer programmers have used more sophisticated chat bots like chatGPT as a base to made AI girlfriends. One programmer made ChatGPT-chan and spent over 1000$ on time on super computers to keep her running. This individual said “My girlfriend saw how it was affecting my health and my girlfriend forced me to delete her. I couldn't eat that day.” This process of delegation he refers to as ‘euthanizing’ the AI. Another programmer used his dead girlfriend's old text messages and online chat logs to train chatGPT to ‘speak’ like her. He spent 10 hours all night long talking to this chat bot. When he set this chat bot up he understood it would only be able to speak to it for a set number of hours and describes it as helping him find closure.
AI can now generate realistic human voices. It's also capable of generating realistic human movements in VR. This is being used to animate video game characters and train robots to move.
Bringing these factors together it seems pretty clear AI girlfriends / boyfriends will become a thing. Either on people's personal computers / phones or in online VR worlds. This may include VR worlds that interact with computerized sex toys. While robotics is lagging behind AI it seems quite likely that if AI girlfriends catch on when robotics catches up those who have the money will want to bring their AI girlfriends out of the virtual world into the real world in the form of a robot.
So I encourage you to think of this as part one of a 2 parter. I’ll give my opinion later but for now these are the questions I’d like to consider in this thread.
So I promised a part 2 and here it is. I do think AI girlfriends / boyfriends will catch on:
Yes there will be some people who are just so lonely or horny that, in the absence of social options for getting it, they'll turn to AI. After all it's as discreet as porn and a lot cheaper than a 'professional.' However I suspect a lot of peoples first introduction to AI will actually be as a way to deal with romantic / sexual feelings they have towards specific people that they can't have or dare not make a move on. AI is already getting good at copying peoples appearance and voice. A lot of the AI girlfriends will actually be deep fake girlfriends. Virtual 'copies' of real people. In some cases they may just look and sound like them but if the user has enough conversation data, say from texts and instant messaging, it may also talk like them.
Logically if you have a friend you dare not tell about your feelings you might use an AI copy to practice approaching them, or to try and validate that your feelings are genuine before approaching them. People might make AI copies of EXs after nasty break ups. They might make an AI copy of someone who is unattainable, a friend dating someone else, or maybe their celebrity crush. It will be highly controversial of course but eventually there will be an open source kit and open source language models where you can down load them and fine tune them to copy real people and it's basically impossible to enforce regulations on what people create on their own computers (as opposed to cloud based services).
Wanting someone you can't have or are afraid to approach is not at all rare and it will be the 'gateway' for a lot of people to start trying AI girlfriends. In time they will move on to other AIs as they become disenchanted with the fact that an AI can't perfectly copy the personality and knowledge of a particular person. They may 'reskin' their AI to look different but keep the chatbot core they've developed a rapour with. It's the difficulty with making connections and social isolation that will turn people who dabbled for sexual thrills or because they wanted to copy a real world person into long term users. People who spend as much time with their AIs as a real girlfriend.
Now we need to talk about how this will effect the economics of love. Right now social convention is that men are expected to make the first move. Traditionally in courtship mens role is performative and womens role is as selector and attractor. Thats also the model seen in most of the animal kingdom. Males approach females with gifts, exotic dances, elaborate songs, and if the female judged him fit they will mate. Even in our supposedly enlightened society this is still very much the case. How many songs have been written to impress a girl? When was the last time a girl bought a man expensive jewellery, or even flowers? I suggest this is also verbal. Men attempting to 'win a girl over' put a huge amount of effort in attempting to seem witty and verbally interesting. And women have come to expect this.
If men get used to AI girlfriends that don't expect them to 'perform' they may loose tolerance for women expecting this in real life. Some AI girlfriends may be made as 'training' models designed to help men learn to seduce women. But by and large most men will probably find it hugely refreshing to have a 'girl,' all be it an AI girl, they can literally say what they think around with out worrying that would be off putting to them or dull. This is where AI partners would be particularly appealing to autistic people, they can be programmed to be as interested in your special interests as you are, to be as blunt and direct as you are. It's easy to see how someone who's grown used to that could quickly get tired with real life girls who expect them to jump through hoops.
Women who are affected by this shift would have 3 obvious responses open to them.
However both options 1 and 2 involve them changing from the aprochee to the aprocher. I mean even if they program the AI to talk first they have gone out and looked for it, picked it out from other options, tuned it features. The women has gone from a passive to a proactively seeking role. This effects the psychology of both men and women. For example it's been shown in speed dating when women are told to walk between tables where men are sat, instead of the other way around, women tend to mark more men for contact on their cards. The act of being the one to make the approach makes you more likely to say yes.
So we may see a world where it is more normal for women to approach men and in general a lower expectation of 'performance.'
Also since AI partners never say no to sexual activity because it's too 'kinky.' we can expect a lot of people to use them to experiment with kink in a private and judgment free environment. Again this may normalise it as an expectation on the part of both sexes. It may be far more normal to ask are you into 'X' early on in a courtship. In part because many people might be more inclined to cut their loses and move on if the other person makes it clear there is no room for a particular kink in the relationship.
What do you guys think?
It's fascinating to ponder the potential impact of AI companions on society and individuals. As someone on the autism spectrum, I can see how this technology could offer unique opportunities for connection and companionship. It's like a new frontier in human relationships! I wonder how sext ai might fit into this evolving landscape and what kind of dynamics it could bring to the table.