AI's effects on interpersonal relationships

Will Ai mess up our interpersonal relationships? AI is booming and there are now AIs coming out that you can have romantic relationships with. Specifically, companies are targeting heterosexual men to have AI relationships with their cyber girlfriend. But how does this affect people going into the real dating scene if they only have experience with AI dating? This is all hypothetical because we are just at the beginning of people starting to get into this. It is an industry that is specifically targeting the lonely and isolated to give them a path to try and “overcome” that, but really just profiting on the misfortune of others. 

Is Ai going to set up unrealistic expectations for dating? If your own experience with talking to someone romantically is an AI generated personality, that is entirely customized to get targeted to your interests and opinions, you aren't getting the real experience of conflict in relationships. In relationships a huge part of building the foundation and creating a long-lasting relationship is learning how to communicate, whether that's during a conflict, or intimacy, or just generally day-to-day conversations, you need to strengthen the muscle of how to communicate and navigate tough conversations. When a personality has been tailored to be your “perfect” match that is because it doesn't have a personality, it's a virtually created design that you can say "I don't like that joke” and they'll no longer tell it, or “tell me I'm pretty” and it will do just that. You are the one in charge of your own reality. That's not the case in relationships, it's two separate independent people who are choosing to be together, that's the beauty of a relationship, they have a separate mind and experience than you. You can debate about things, share opinions, share experience, teach each other, challenge each other. Ai doesn't provide that, it provides companionship without any of the things that should be happening in relationships, like growth. 

How does this affect people in the long run? Not having exposure to what it looks like to move through rough patches in relationships is going to be detrimental to your transition away from AI relationships to real relationships. If your expectations and experience lie within always being right, always having the other change to accommodate you, always being the center of attention. Those are hard habits to break when you realize most people aren't going to put up with that. They are going to have a mind of their own that you can just mold to every  thought you have. The harsh reality is that not every partner is going to enjoy your humor, or agree with everything you say, or let you be the star of the show. Not only is that hard to deal with from the side of the person who was in an AI relationship, but also the person dating someone who was in an AI relationship. If it was me, I'd be a little pissed off that they wanted me to change to always accommodate them. It could be emotionally taxing dating someone who has little to no experience around relationships that aren't AI if you have to teach them what a real relationship looks and acts like. 

Could this cause further alienation? A big problem in our society is incels, and incels are born through alienation. Not feeling like women are interested in them, and therefore creating really problematic and anger fueled opinions towards women. With AI, this could go two ways, it could create experiences for these people that help them cultivate positive experiences towards women and break down the feelings of not getting women to be interested in them. It could also result in them trying to date real women, realizing their tactics that worked with the AI girlfriend don't work on the real women they are interested in and then creating a further isolation and alienation because people aren't acting like their AI girlfriend which is what they are comfortable and used to. Ai sex bots are also seen to be a place where people can explore their fantasies, which sounds like it could be a good thing, until you see a lot of these fantasies played out are violent, or illegal activities. Is it ethical to give unrestricted access to that fantasy? Similarly to physical sex bots that have been created in Asia, the fantasy being played out has been discussed by experts, which say that it is not a good idea. In Hong Kong, Japan, and China there have been child sex bots made which can include, the likeness of a child the client knows, a voice recording, and the ability to show whatever expression the client wants whether that's fear, sadness, or excitement. When experts studied this they said that it would only reinforce and normalize the behavior of pedophiles, therefore with the possibility of increasing violence against children not decreasing it. 

Does verbally abusing an AI girlfriend matter? It's troubling to think that these men are acting out their aggression to someone who is their theoretical girlfriend, because it is symptomatic of a problem with their relations towards women. But on the other end, the AI is not a real person, it's computer generated, it doesn't have real emotions, and cannot be traumatized the same way a real person can be. I think there's a micro and macro effect to it, on one hand it doesn't matter if you're abusing a chatbot because it's just a computer, but the macro effect is that it reinforces and normalizes that behavior towards women. Even when talking about the possibility of it creating more incels, that's what we need to take into consideration, that in a sense it seemingly doesn't matter. But when taking a step back we can see that these aren't inherent behaviors, they are learned, or born out of alienation, and loneliness and this could be a band-aid solution for a bullet wound. 

As AI progresses we will see how our relationship towards it develops, AI girlfriends are just the tip of the iceberg to the new reality of what our future will look like. We are living in the era of tech, with the continuous advancement of AI and chatbots there will be more and more integration into our everyday life. It's hard to theorize what will happen with these changes because other than fictional sci-fi movies, we have nothing to compare it to. The only thing we do know is there's no going back, we aren't at a place of regression, we will only get more and more access to new tech. 

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