If you search for “AI girlfriend,” it sure seems like there’s a market — everything from AI Girlfriend to the “fun and flirty dating simulator” Anima to simply using ChatGPT to create a bot trained on your own loved one. Most of the AI girlfriends (they’re almost always “girlfriends”) seem designed for socially awkward straight men to either test-drive dating (a rehearsal, of sorts) or replace human women altogether. But they fit neatly into a particular kind of fantasy: that a machine designed to fulfill my needs and my needs alone might fulfill my romantic requirements and obviate the need for some messy, needy human with skin and hang-ups and needs of their own. It’s love, of a kind — an impoverished, arrested-development love.

…The question lurking behind all of these tales is whether these same AIs, taught and trained to love, can invert that love into hate and choose to destroy us. It won’t be just a fight of species against species for survival; it will be a targeted destruction, retribution for our behavior. But deeper still is the human question: If we develop an ethical responsibility to love the creatures we have made — and we fail to do so — then isn’t destruction what we deserve?

Read more:

Wilkinson, A. (2023, September 7). Can AI learn to love — and can we learn to love it? Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23779067/artificial-intelligence-ai-her-movies-ex-machina-2001-blade-runner-robots