AI Girlfriends: Ultimate Dating Revolution for Men or Catastrophic Love Story for the World?
Spoiler alert: both!
Dating, love, and relationships: never since the beginning of time have these subjects been more controversial. It’s so difficult to reach common ground these days that just the thought of plunging into the dating pool will give some of us the creeps.
Some people (usually women) have just had enough: they’re opting out. They have their own money, jobs, education, brains, and a strong support system in place.
Others, however (usually men) had no choice but to involuntarily step out of the game as well.
Times are changing and this brave new world is asking for a sacrifice a lot of men are not willing to make. On the contrary — men have been waiting for an alternative to dating ever since women became independent.
And they might just have it sooner than expected. And it can take whatever shape and form they want.
Just the thought of it instantly reminded me of Ethan, who used to be my client in therapy.
He had a sticker on the back of his phone: a manga cartoon of a semi-pubescent girl on her knees, with her butt to the camera, smiling bashfully, dressed in tiny triangles of cloth masquerading as a bathing suit.
Ethan was actively looking for a girlfriend, meeting women through Tinder. The purpose of the sticker was to act as a visual representation of what he was in the market for. He was showing his dates the sticker so they knew what he was looking for.
Nothing wrong with having a type, but… I advised if he really wants a relationship, he might want to consider taking the sticker off.
He disagreed and added a new one, in the same style.
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Ethan kept dating and wondering why he can’t find anyone who would accept him for who he is.
You know, he was searching for that kind of unconditional love that only mothers can give. And if those mothers looked like hyper-sexualized underage cartoons, even better!
There’s no secret that a lot of men are looking for exactly that kind of relationship. And there’s no secret that women are less and less interested in being a partner in that kind of relationship.
And wherever there is a problem, there are people looking for a solution.
There is an expanding gap between what men want and what women are willing to give. How can we fill that gap? Where will men find the women they’re looking for?
It’s easy: in the world of fiction. And since technology is so evolved, the world of fiction can become interactive. Enter AI girlfriends — the product whose only purpose is to make men happy, more fulfilled, and less lonely.
But do they?
One part of the equation is easy. Women who posed as girlfriends that men never get to touch but who would tell them everything they wanted to hear have existed for a long time, through the magic of virtual sex work, aka camming.
Tens of thousands of women would be sitting in front of a camera and behind a computer screen, offering men the girlfriend experience from a distance, and mixing into it as much sexuality and love as the men wanted and were willing to pay for.
Did it work? In the short term, yes, it absolutely did work. They did make men less lonely for a while. They gave them hope. The ‘girlfriends’ accepted their every fault, faked caring for them, and catered to their every whim.
What’s more, they took their abuse. Because yes, unsurprisingly, a lot of men who are paying for relationships whether online or otherwise, are abusive. They don’t have the skills or means to have a relationship in real life or they just enjoy hurting others.
It’s not every case, but it happens a lot.
In some instances, the relationship can turn into scamming. A lot of men have given their life earnings to one day be able to meet a camgirl two continents and an ocean away, imagining the woman truly loves them.
Usually, there is no scamming involved: the men pay for a service and the women provide that service.
Long term, however, the whole process is destructive.
What happens for a lot of these men is that a relationship devoid of real interaction, where somebody tells you exactly what you want to hear and embodies your deepest fantasies is extremely addictive.
And if you think one real person is addictive, imagine what AI can do.
One human virtual girlfriend, no matter how skilled in the subtleties of the male psyche, is still human and prone to error. Sometimes she will say the wrong thing or she will just be fed up with the idiocy and abuse of her client and she will tell him to go to hell. I’ve seen it happen. Real women are humanly flawed, believe it or not. They’re human, therefore not perfect.
AI, however… Technology is the closest we have to perfection. And even though it might not be 100%, it’s the closest we get to reaching new levels of perfection.
Let’s not forget that AI is still so young. But in training.
It starts off with the programmed wisdom of a team of people who feed it whatever they wanted to feed it. And these people’s interest has never been to make the world a better place.
The interest is as old as time and is the same as the cam girls’ interest: get more clients, make more money.
Are these clients going to be happy with the services AI provides? If they’re not, they don’t have to keep going. Nobody is forcing them. Just like nobody is forcing people to lose their homes for heroin and start living on the streets.
But heroin is illegal. Because it ruins lives. Although it looks like a choice, it’s not. People can’t stop themselves when their brain is short-circuited by things that work on a chemical level. Or on a psychological level.
And no matter how much we love to think we’re in control of our lives, there are things much more powerful than us out there.
And I’m not talking about Cthulhu.
If we are to take a good look at ourselves, it’s easy to see how much our brains can be highjacked by things that are present in our everyday lives.
How we can’t stop after only a handful of potato chips. Or an Oreo. Or a glass of wine. How many times didn’t we feel like crap right after a party, with our bodies and senses soaked in whisky and trying to make the room stop spinning?
Is that the way you wanted to feel? I bet the answer is no.
I bet all those men who lost their homes and hearts to sweet-as-pie virtual girlfriends didn’t want that either.
AI, however, is a whole different cup of tea. A cup of tea that is just straight-up whiskey and it will get you so drunk that you’ll forget you even had a real life before it.
It will look like AI is the answer to all your problems. It can be anything you want. All your wildest fantasies. Also the most macabre ones, the taboo, and the illegal.
It’s already happening. Some men are running ‘abusive boyfriend experiments’ on AI, just to see what happens, they say.
As if the abusive boyfriend experiment hasn’t been done enough already.
Some of these men will also tell you that there’s nothing wrong with using an AI for whatever you want because AI has no feelings and there’s a long road until they develop consciousness.
And letting an AI take your rage, bullying, and abuse will only help you because there are fewer chances to take your rage out on the world.
Just like playing violent computer games won’t make you more violent. Won’t it, though?…
The American Psychological Association thinks that even brief exposure to violent games will have a negative effect on the player:
Playing violent video games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Mortal Kombat can increase a person’s aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior both in laboratory settings and in actual life.
However, studies are quite mixed on this one, so let’s not even consider it as an answer.
Let’s consider the following: whether the recipient of abuse is hurt by it or not, why are we allowing it to happen? Is it ok to cut up a dead body just because it can’t feel the pain? The answer is: no. And the action is punishable by law.
There is this common misbelief about how anger, violence, and aggression work. People believe that letting it happen and manifesting it out into the world will make it easier to let go of.
That is false. Punching your way out of anger doesn’t work. It’s actually the other way around. Violence breeds violence.
Think of all the abusive men who beat their wives. They never let it go, no matter how many times they do it. They still want to do it again the next day.
So the existence of AI that’s willing to be abused will not help anybody. Certainly not the men involved. And definitely not society.
There is one person it will help with tons of cash though: the owner, creator, and merchandiser of the AI girlfriend. That’s what they’re doing it for, anyway.
As a first thought, it seems that AI girlfriends are a brilliant idea.
What other solution is there, anyway?
Empowered women are no longer willing to date old-school men. Men on the other hand are not willing to change. Drama and fighting ensues. No agreement is reached and the dating gap widens.
Sensing an opportunity in the market, AI companies intervene and offer men an alternative: AI girlfriends. This way everybody’s happy. Men stop pestering women with unwanted attention and go about their day, content to have some form of woman in their life, one that they can create however they see fit.
Why wouldn’t this work?
Because it’s not real. It only works as idea, but when put it into practice, it results in addiction, abuse, alienation, and a dystopian society that we’d be lucky to get out of alive.
It is, however, inevitable. And before it ends tragically, we’d better make sure we bring 2 new dimension to the AI table: empathy and personal accountability.
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