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?