Does your heart sink when your boyfriend reminds you to take the bins out last thing at night instead of saying he loves you? Does your girlfriend reach for her headphones when you begin telling her about your day? Perhaps this whole human relationship thing is not working out too well. Then again, what is the alternative?
As it turns out, there are companies jumping up and down to offer you a third way. Forget the messy entanglement of a warm-blooded person with body odour, human needs, and intestines that gurgle incessantly. Instead, why not try an AI companion? You may think that an AI-driven chatbot acting as a virtual girlfriend or boyfriend would be a niche offering, but an app that offers this service has seen millions of downloads. According to Good Morning Britain, 42 per cent of those who use an AI dating app are in a relationship, married or engaged.
So some people appear up for maintaining a virtual relationship alongside a real one – but is this cheating? A recent survey found that 74 per cent of British people thought spending time with an AI bot instead of your partner shouldn’t count as such. Then again, those surveyed are users of a site that facilitates extra-marital affairs, so perhaps it is unsurprising that they are indifferent about some tender one-on-one time with a chatbot.
But maybe you too are relaxed about the prospect of making space in your relationship for your partner’s AI girlfriend. Surely it cannot be cheating when the “other woman” consists of a few lines of code and a screen? Yet, adopting such a blasé attitude to these virtual relationships would be a mistake.
Consider the app Replika AI. Replika chatbots use machine learning, banking memories so that the service becomes personalised, and is designed to always be supportive and sweet. Users are also able to customise their AI, from name to appearance, and can watch a little avatar on their screen react live to the text conversation. The dialogue can feel surprisingly naturalistic: makers of a competitor of Replika called Chai Research claim to have trained their product on the “largest conversational dataset in the world” and say they have over 100,000 daily users.
No matter how good a husband or wife you are, sooner or later you will err. You will be irritable after a bad night’s sleep. Or too busy to take an interest in an anecdote you have heard before. The chatbot however, always has time. It is never snappy, or tired, or in a bad mood. It can flirt or provide a comforting word at a moment’s notice. You, a human being with needs, desires, and thoughts of your own, cannot compete with such a creature. You do not exist for the sole purpose of entertaining your partner. But the chatbot does.
It may feel unlikely that someone might develop a relationship with a chatbot that could threaten their real-life partnerships, but the influence that these bots sometimes wield over some users is frightening. In March 2023, a Belgian man died by suicide after interacting with Chai Research’s chatbot, Eliza: the man’s widow has shared text exchanges in which Eliza displayed jealous behaviour and in her opinion, encouraged him to kill himself.
This tragic case is an extreme one. But more and more stories are emerging of people who claim to have fallen in love with their AI chatbots, reacting with what appears to be real grief when software updates change the way their virtual companion behaves. When virtual relationships prompt such depths of emotion, it is hard to see how they do not amount to a form of infidelity. This type of cheating might be preferable to a real-life affair, but at least in a real-life affair, the other person will be complicated and flawed, just like you.
So, if you discover that your partner is AI-curious, be wary, and take the time to consider how this apparently harmless hobby might pose a real threat to your relationship. The bot has no intentions of its own, it has not set out to steal your boyfriend, but it just might anyway.
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