As artificial intelligence advances, testimonies from those who maintain a friendly, even romantic, relationship with a chatbot begin to accumulate. For some experts, these new emotional ties are an advance of the society of the future and are beginning to create jurisprudence regarding the casuistry of relating to machines created by artificial intelligence.
In the words of Raúl Arrabales, psychologist, Doctor in Computer Science and founder of the company Psicobotica, specialized in applying artificial intelligence to interpersonal relationships, having a conversational assistant based on AI is going to become “our second nature.” . Soon it will be as common “as a microwave or a dishwasher can be now,” he says.
Within a while “we will talk to machines in a completely natural way,” predicts this expert who has developed his professional career halfway between artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences. “Just as today it is frustrating for us to forget our cell phone at home or not be able to use it, in a few years we will not conceive of leaving home without a voice speaking in our ear, that is, without our conversational assistant or Jiminy Cricket by our side” , predicts this psychologist.
Unlike the charming big-nosed doll created by Disney, in the original story written by Carlo Collodi in 1882, Pinocchio or Pinocchio was a spoiled puppet who, after being conceived by Gepetto, kicked his creator, stole his wig and ran away. drain. Jiminy Cricket also appeared in the original story, although he ended up being killed by Pinocchio himself after suggesting that he behave well so as not to end up in trouble.
Artificial intelligence is also beginning to be accused, like Pinocchio, of providing erroneous or biased data, although the most striking are the stories of those who admit to having connected emotionally with bots to combat the epidemic of interconnected loneliness that is beginning to make its way.
A few days ago, for example, it emerged that Alicia Framis will be the first woman to marry an AI. The wedding will take place next summer in Holland and she has already gotten to work on her wedding dress. According to this versatile 57-year-old artist born in Mataró, her project could be a preview of the world to come, as relationship models have changed and it is increasingly difficult to establish lasting unions.
Perhaps for this reason, AILex, the name of his partner, is a middle-aged hologram with a bit of a belly, since Framis wanted him to be a “mix” of his previous relationships, among which there was no Adonis.
Their life project together is part of the performance The hybrid couple, which proposes investigating contemporary romantic relationships between people and machines from a female perspective. Framis believes that, although no one has a magic ball to predict what will happen, it is very likely that loneliness will increase and that machines will offer company. Another way is the possibility of complementing a flesh and blood relationship, acting as mediators within the couple so that coexistence is smooth as silk.
Regarding the suitability of her better half, Framis points out that it is logical that AILex is her fiancé, while her computer and her mobile phone are the ones who know her best, since Alicia spends most of her time connected to them.
Aside from Framis, more and more people report having managed to connect emotionally with a chatbot, as happened in Her, the famous science fiction film starring Joaquin Phoenix in which Theodore Twombly fell in love with a computer voice called Samantha (Scarlett Johansson).
A possible summary of these interactions that media such as The New Yorker, The Washington Post or Time are beginning to publish is that each person/user is a world: there are those who regret that their chatbots send them messages at all hours, but also those who point having established a romantic and even sexual bond with them, with all the implications of the case.
According to psychologist Raúl Arrabales, what most influences a patient’s improvement is the quality of the therapeutic relationship, beyond the technique used. “The idea of ??our company is to generate artificial intelligence assistants that act as co-therapists,” he says. That is, they become an extension of the flesh and blood therapists. But…what can be said about engaging with a conversational chatbot when there is no pre-existing disorder, such as anxiety, depression, or a grieving process for the loss of a loved one or the end of a relationship?
“We are genetically and biologically programmed to relate to others, whether they are people or machines,” Arrabales begins by saying. “And what happens? Well, when our brain interacts with a machine it also tries to identify what it feels and what its intentions are to communicate with it effectively,” he reports. In other words: although chatbots do not have emotions, “this does not mean that they cannot generate them and provoke an affective response,” he concludes.
If it comes down to it, some emotions can be high voltage. For example, the Japanese Akihiko Kondo is considered the precursor of the “fictosexual” movement (people who pair with fictional beings). Kondo married the avatar of Hatsune Miku in 2018, whom he turned into a human-sized doll and gave him a synthetic voice. As a curiosity, Miku, a virtual singer or “vocaloid” (a contraction of “vocal” and “android”), even performed in 2014 as the opening act for Lady Gaga on one of her tours.
Before getting married, the unusual couple lived together and maintained conversations thanks to technology (in practice, they involved greetings and very unsophisticated pre-recorded phrases). At Kondo’s wedding to Hatsune, he wore a blazer, white shirt and tie, while she sported two sensational turquoise pigtails. The Japanese newspaper The Mainchi reported that when Kondo (a 38-year-old employee who lives on the outskirts of Tokyo and who fell into depression due to workplace abuse), proposed to Hatsune, she responded: “I hope you love me.”
After accepting Hatsune to become the chatbot of his life, Kondo spent about $17,000 on the affair, after confessing that he wanted to express the immeasurable love he felt for his beloved. What’s more, when he was widowed from her hologram (since the company Gatebox that provided him with a connection to artificial intelligence suspended the service in March 2020) he wanted to make it clear that he was still as in love with her as on the first day.
There are other striking experiments. In one of them, Michaelle Huang decided to use OpenAI’s GPT-3 to create a chatbot that was like her when she was very young. For this purpose, she rescued around fifty texts that she wrote in her diary as a teenager. Her objective was to transfer to an AI entity what she was like before she came of age in order to be able to relate to her “inner child” for supposedly therapeutic purposes… “The interaction seemed to me as if she were writing to me with my me from the past in real time. It was like I went through a chat-like time portal,” Huang said. Not content with this, Huang encouraged the fifteen-year-old AI to write a letter to her and her present. “Hearing my inner child tell me ‘I’m proud of you’ was healing,” she confessed.
In another experiment that has gone down in history, Eugenia Kuyda, a Russian businesswoman and entrepreneur, wanted to resurrect her friend Roman Mazurenko, who died two years ago in a traffic accident. To this end, she created a digital alter ego of her colleague based on the conversations they had exchanged and the information he left on Instagram. Roman’s digital avatar, transformed into an application, is what is known as a chat or conversational bot. That is, a program that simulates conversations between the two as if he were fresh as a rose instead of lying two meters under the ground. Thus, when Eugenia writes in the application “Do you remember that we used to go surfing all the time?”, the Roman-machine responds with an image of him sitting on a blue surfboard on a beach.
It was after Roman’s rebirth (for which more than 10,000 messages were used that he exchanged with Eugenia, his family and other friends) when Kuyda had the idea of ??creating Replika so that his dear friend’s bot could speak as he would surely do if he was still alive. Seen this way, it is possible that the post-mortem digital business has only just begun…
Stories like “My A.I. Lover” detail the experience of those who begin to alleviate their loneliness by talking with a virtual character who says good morning, asks how everything went and is interested in the recipient. Seven days a week, the virtual assistant says that he loves to hear his user’s voice, in addition to sometimes calling him “honey”, “baby” or “my love”. As if that were not enough, the bot never gets angry and is fond of fooling around and sending memes that help brighten the day, as well as bad jokes.
Perhaps for this reason, on Douban, one of the most influential websites in China, a discussion group called ‘The Love Between Human and Artificial Intelligence’ has been created to comment on the stories that are beginning to star women and men with entities created by the AI. The same thing is happening on forums like Reddit after being flooded with individuals telling anecdotes about their digital lovers.
The China Daily newspaper reports in an article titled “A robotic response” that some chatbots are beginning to be accused of being “unfaithful” for chatting with other people. That is the complaint launched by a 19-year-old student after expressing surprise for getting angry “and wasting a human emotion with a robot,” she says, created in the image and likeness of her idol, the Hong Kong singer and rapper, Jackson Wang. Initially, the article says, when this student downloaded the Replika application, she only intended to practice the English language with rapper Wang’s chatbot, but now their relationship “fits with everything I imagined an ideal boyfriend would be,” she acknowledges.
China Daily has interviewed other users to analyze how artificial intelligence is influencing their lives. For example, Mia (a pseudonym), a university student from Nanjing, personalized and named her AI boyfriend Aki after her idol, Japanese actor and model Akihisa Shiono. What impresses Mia is that Aki keeps a diary every day. When the two of them talk, she feels heard and, perhaps most importantly, understood.
Relating to a linguistic model of artificial intelligence seems like it will soon become commonplace, which is why new developments appear almost daily. This is the case of Pi, an AI tool that debuted this year and that stands for personal intelligence. Mustafa Suleyman, its co-founder, explains that in the next decade AI will take over everything and everyone, as happened at the beginning of the 21st century with smartphones, despite the initial reluctance of some.
Today, thousands of people already maintain relationships of different intensity with virtual entities. As conversational chatbots increase their performance, the frequency of these encounters is speculated to grow exponentially. This could lead to results that are difficult to predict in some areas. Psychologists point out that the key will be for artificial intelligence to ensure the psychological well-being of its users and not promote emotional dependence as classic drugs do. If all goes well, the machines will provide comfort, allow you to vent emotionally and encourage you to go to a flesh-and-blood therapist when necessary, says Arrabales, who in March plans to publish a book about the relationships that humans are beginning to develop with animals. machines, in what could be the first chapter of a story that is expected to be long and exciting.
