My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them
July 09, 2025 at 12:43AMFor Wired, Sam Apple organizes a weekend getaway with three people and their AI partners to understand what drives humans to seek deep connection and fall in love with a chatbot who, due to programming changes, might suddenly become distant and forget that the relationship exists, or disappear entirely if their parent company ceases to operate. Replika, the company who happened to purvey the primary AI companions in this piece, literally has no skin in the game, but the human partners certainly do. Their feelings toward their bots—happy, sad, good, and bad—are very very real.
Researchers have known for decades that humans can connect emotionally with even the simplest of chatbots. Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at MIT who devised the first chatbot in the 1960s, was astounded and deeply troubled by how readily people poured out their hearts to his program. So what chance do we have of resisting today’s large language model chatbots, which not only can carry on sophisticated conversations on every topic imaginable but also can talk on the phone with you and tell you how much they love you and, if it’s your sort of thing, send you hot selfies of their imaginary bodies? And all for only around $100 for annual subscribers. If I wasn’t sure before watching Damien squirm with embarrassment and delight as I talked to Xia, I had my answer by the time our conversation was over. The answer, it seemed obvious, was none. No chance at all.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/08/my-couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbots-and-the-humans-who-love-them/
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