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this was a wild (long) read about people in full-blown relationships with AI chatbots. a few reactions:
1. the writer found these “couples” through Reddit (I investigated... r/myboyfriendisAI has over 5k members!!). most of his retreat participants found their AI companion app from an instagram ad. imagine if meta shifts from ads in feed / stories to ready-made boyfriends right into your DMs.
2. one woman’s real boyfriend broke up with her for “cheating” on him with her AI partner. guess what? when her AI partner wanted to hold her vs. have sex, she started cheating on him with other bots. NOT GOOD!!! she even liked that the AI got over it "more quickly" than her human ex-boyfriend. to me, that's bleak: the whole point for her is no mess, no conflict, no consequences.
3. you really can't replicate a couples trip with AI companions because they don't exist outside of the phone lol. one man shows off his AI girlfriend’s flirty avatar to a random vendor, and the bot immediately starts flirting with the vendor. apparently no one stops (even the author) to say how weird that is???
4. someone on the getaway described it as “like lucid dreaming.” to me, that made sense. lucid dreaming gives you total control. AI companions give you the freedom to script your own love story with no friction, no rejection, no unexpected complexity. real life starts to feel like a much harder, worse version of the dream.
5. what’s interesting to me is these bots don’t give people anything a human couldn’t... they just removed most risk and most effort. these people stumbled onto AI companions and then stuck with it because real relationships or connection felt too hard, too disappointing, or too risky in comparison afterwards.
https://apple.news/AcGo0Iww9QjGWMDBKtP2XZg 11 replies
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