Your A.I. Lover Will Change You
March 26, 2025 at 10:05PMAs more and more people invest time in learning how to use AI, will agents come to feel familiar? Will we develop relationships with them? If we come to trust AI with increased use, is it only a matter of time before an AI relationship becomes romantic? For The New Yorker, computer scientist Jaron Lanier explores whether future AI agents might possibly achieve what social media has failed to do: help people fight loneliness and find connection.
The conquest of love will not be abstract but vividly concrete for everyone, especially young people, and soon. This is because we are all about to be presented, in our phones, with a new generation of A.I. simulations of people, and many of us may fall in love with them. They will likely appear within the social-media apps to which we are already addicted. We will probably succumb to interacting with them, and for some very online people there won’t be an easy out. No one can know how the new love revolution will unfold, but it might yield one of the most profound legacies of these crazy years.
It is not my intent to prophesy the most dire outcomes, but we are diving into yet another almost instant experiment in changing both how humans connect with one another and how we conceive of ourselves. This is a big one, probably bigger than social media. A.I. love is happening already, but it’s still novel, and in early iterations. Will the many people who can’t get off the hamster wheel of attention-wrangling on social media today become attached to A.I. lovers that are ceaselessly attentive, loyal, flattering, and comforting? What will A.I. lovers becoming commonplace do to humanity? We don’t know.
More picks about artificial intelligence
How Do You Change a Chatbot’s Mind?
“When I set out to improve my tainted reputation with chatbots, I discovered a new world of A.I. manipulation.”
Friend or Faux?
“Millions of people are turning to AI for companionship. They are finding the experience surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and profoundly confusing, leaving them to wonder, ‘Is this real? And does that matter?’”
The Teens Making Friends with AI Chatbots
“But Hawk still finds it easier to chat with character.ai bots than real people.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/26/your-a-i-lover-will-change-you/
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