Will AI make girlfriends a thing of the past?

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.

Background

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.

Questions

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.

  • Would you be interested in this?
  • How will the people who use this be viewed?
  • If this catches on among those who can’t get romantic / sexual partners might it spread more widely to those who can but see some down sides to ‘real’ relationships or the process of seeking them.
  • How will this effect the dating process? Will this mean people who used to find partners now struggle to do so or have to go about it differently?
  • As a gay man myself, I’d never be interested in an AI boyfriend, even though I’ve known of other gay men who behave like “rabid dogs on heat” on the gay scene and elsewhere when these issues arise 

  • I’ve known of people like this, both straight and gay, men and women, of all ages - and even if they are incredibly rich and/or successful in life, they lead very empty lives and are also incredibly lonely, where nothing seems to fill that void in thier lives - they may have been raised properly, but at some point they must have lost something they once had, which drives thier sense of emptiness, causing them to seek out all kinds of distractions that never satisfy - I count myself lucky to have escaped that kind of lifestyle because of the kind of values system I was raised with, which was traditional Irish Rural Catholic and the “simple” Irish Catholic Faith - I don’t feel the need to get a fabulous high-rise apartment and snort coke every night after a high-flying city job, hiring the company of a 20 something gay male escort with the perfect hot bod, so I certainly have even less need for an AI boyfriend - in fact, I’d rather have a quiet night in with my teddy bears 

  • again there you go reframing everything in absurd terms. Any time anyone tries to pick up a girl it's 'harassment' by your definition. Only on the basis of that absurd premise does persistence in approaching different women make one awful.

    You define success for some one trying to pick up girls as 'an opportunity to get away with rape.'

    I'm not going to take assertions like this seriously and no one else should. You bravely stand up and speak for the rest of female kind as their self appointed mouthpiece but all you have to back up your position is your feelings. Respectfully come back to the discussion when you have some arguments founded in logic and facts not your feelings and some special magical knowledge you think is granted to you by virtue of your gender.

  • Actually also the opposite. A person who has been in a relationship, especially with a partner you think of as being more attractive / successful than yourself may seem more attractive to you. The person may be seen as in demand. And its basic economics that a product that is in demand goes up in value.

  • So they don't see you as an achievable romantic prospect and therefore you can stay single.

  • I wouldn't, but there are cultures and families where single status is seen as shameful.

  • Why would you want to fake a relationship in front of people you know?? Is there something wrong with being single?

  • What’s so hard about weeding out the fakes on an app? We all do it. People who are serious about looking for casual encounters do not mind paying for membership if it means that your matches are also looking for the same thing. Of course you still might need to be attracted to them. 

    Same goes for sex workers. It’s their job. You pay to receive. If it’s so much of a requirement, you are going to make sure you can afford to pay for it! Who cares what other people think about the service. If that’s what you want, or all you can get, do it?

    Of course you pay for services like escorts, that’s what they are there for. Do you expect them to do this for free? They keep their relationships separate from work, if they are in a relationship that is. 

    Even if you had a girlfriend, you still need to splash the cash some of the time. Trips out together, meals, gifts on special occasions, just as she would buy for you too. 

    Lastly, the early stages of a relationship are getting to know them. Once you are dating you might want to see them more often, but it’s certainly isn’t every minute of every day. It might a few times a week if you live close. I don’t know how you can assume things about people and relationships, unless you have some experience yourself, that doesn’t consist of watching others.

  • Having actually spoken to women, I can guarantee you that there aren't any who are going to be open to sleeping with someone who is playing that kind of numbers game, unless they're either too intoxicated to consent or feel like they can't safely say no. Let's be honest, when people who do this kind of cold approach talk about "success" that's what they mean: obtaining sex without meaningful consent but in a way where they're less likely to be prosecuted than a straightforward violent assault.

    Even if your laughable claim were true, you'd have to be an absolutely awful person to be willing to harass 2 BILLION people in order to get one shag.

  • Show off their boyfriends? Who? When? Why? What a ridiculous remark. And you came to this conclusion how?

  • Hi Peter - as a gay man I had to respond, as in my years on the Dublin gay scene and elsewhere, I would have endlessly flirted with handsome men regardless if they were gay or straight, as I could never resist a handsome man  - and aside from the twerking in hot pants, yes, I’m a longtime Kylie Minogue fan, as most gay men simply adore Kylie, the epitome of class and sophistication and Kylie has been in many respects an ally who has went through many of the struggles that we gay men have - I think that if gay men are flirting with you, this must mean that you are somewhat attractive and I think that gay men want to bag a straight man as a trophy while seeing straight women as competition in this area, even though straight women and gay men are otherwise friends - we see Joan Collins as Alexis in Dynasty the same way, who has inspired many drag queens long before Ru Paul’s Drag Race as we gay men do love our Divas 

  • I'm sure there will be a lot of people who feel that way. But for all the reasons on my opening post I think there will be a lot who don't as well.

  • Also if you have terrible social skills and are looking for a partner who won't dump you if you say/do the wrong thing.

  • A virtual avatar AI boyfriend seems equally as horrendous to me. The thought of moving a slider to create the illusion of a physically aging person would make it seem even less real to me, and as though it should belong in the kind of video games my son tends to play.

    If I knew with certainty that I was going to spend the rest of my life as a completely single person, I still don't think it would tempt me to go down the AI route. The bottom line is that no matter how realistic it might look, sound, or behave, I would know it wasn't real.

  • Especially if you're a marginalised human being treated like a robot or second class citizen and generally pushed to the edges of society.

  • Perhaps. It's hard to get hard data or relationships. There are few things people lie about as much as romantic / sexual relationships. Especially to themselves. It's hard to get beyond anecdotal evidence here.

  • I thought of Blade Runner 2019 when I read this. I think that's not far away. Whether people want that... maybe some people want that, but I think many (most?) people want to be loved for themselves, not because someone (or "someone") has been programmed to act loving towards you. But I guess for some people it would work, particularly if very lonely or wanting sex more than love, or to appear romantically successful to peers and family.

  • Depends on the context. A robot or virtual avatar doesn't age unless you make it do. For a virtual avatar AI boyfriend this could be as easy as moving a slider. For a robot it might involve sending it away every 5- 10 years to have a new skin put on it.

    A VR avatar can obviously put on a VR kettle but you can't 'drink' what comes out. Robotic technology that can pour you a cup of tea is already here but far from affordable right now. A VR avatar could absolutely go for a walk with you or shave as you take a bath, in VR. Walking robots exist but are expensive and none of them look human. Robotics just isn't ready yet for the AI boyfriend experence. VR probably is and holographics might not be so far behind (think joi from blade runner)

  • show them off to friends and family

    That could use some rephrasing, perhaps.

    '...simply because most women seem to want their boyfriends to be part of their social lives. To show them off to friends and family etc. Most men, at least in the early stage of the relationship, seem quite happy to keep their girlfriends to themselves and not introduce them to friends and family.'

    We all do it, including me, but you appear to be treating your assumptions as truths.

  • It's not accidental at all and I'm not suggesting girls wouldn't be interested in AI boyfriends. But the point of starting this thread was to discuss how AI romantic/sexual partners might change society, and especially the relationships between men and women. And I think AI girlfriends will have more of an impact that AI boyfriends simply because most women seem to want their boyfriends to be part of their social lives. To show them off to friends and family etc. Most men, at least in the early stage of the relationship, seem quite happy to keep their girlfriends to themselves and not introduce them to friends and family. So it will be easier for men to dodge any social stigma and still have the patterns of relationship they are comfortable with. Remember I promised a part 2 and I'm still working on it.

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