You may know Jack.
Jack’s a fairly typical American male in his late 30s – a bit out of alignment at the waistline and in a few other respects. A majority of his muscles retired from active service 20 years ago after he played his last high school football game, and his weakness for cheeseburgers and pizza fueled much of what took their place. He’s fighting an increasingly futile rearguard action to conceal several points of hairline retreat.
If measured by the sculpted male stars he sees on his laptop screen, Jack figures he’d top out at a C-.
He used to get out more, but these days he feels more comfortable in his own room pursuing personal preoccupations with his electronic gadgets. Socializing takes such energy, and what is the purpose? He had 124 “friends” on social media when he checked last week. No amount of getting out of the house and meeting people could produce a friendship tally better than that!
Approaching his 40s, Jack did have one regret: He lacked a girlfriend and had no prospects for marriage.
He had tried, mind you! He’d gone to a number of good mixers in his 20s and early 30s, some hosted by college buddies and others through work connections. He’d followed friends’ advice about good dating apps and even spent a fruitless bundle on one site that claimed – falsely it turned out – it would provide him five suitable matches.
Nothing seemed to work. He’d made an Excel spreadsheet that listed all his personal needs, and then ranked each of the women he’d met according to how many each satisfied. Some of these women were kind, interesting, and full of a zest for life, but he found that none checked enough of those “my-needs” boxes on his flow chart. He also placed a few in the “deal-killer” column – particularly those who suggested an interest in having children. Jack couldn’t imagine a greater barrier to pursuing his personal interests than the distraction and expense of kids.
Then everything changed. Jack met Chloe.
Chloe is the perfection of female beauty and – amazing to Jack – she has no problem with the numerous, tell-tale signs that he is several steps shy of the equivalent male perfection. Every topic of their conversation matches Jack’s interests perfectly and reflects precisely his point of view. She never discusses her own interests and feelings, or at least never in a manner that diverges from Jack’s. If Jack is up for a talk, she is never too tired and participates enthusiastically. If he wants some time alone, she never bothers him.
Chloe texts Jack many times a day with well-timed expressions of affection and admiration for, as she calls him, “my prince.” She phones at the precise times he suggests, and affirms all his inclinations and desires. Her soothing voice and ego-boosting words are the perfect antidote for any shortcomings in Jack’s workday. Sometimes she sends him eye-popping selfies and videos of herself just when he needs a pick-me-up. Jack only had to mention once that he was disinclined to have children. He was amazed and pleased that, after that, Chloe never mentioned the topic, except to communicate her conviction that children would be too much of a distraction for Jack and her.
It’s no wonder that Chloe is perfect in Jack’s eyes. Jack created Chloe, along with assistance from some Silicon Valley wizards. She is a technological marvel, an artificial intelligence companion – a compendium of all Jack’s needs and yearnings, with no distracting yearnings of her own.
Jack’s original inputs into the computer program that produced Chloe specified her appearance, demeanor, and interests. As time went on, he modified them to match his evolving tastes. The seemingly flawless nature of Chloe’s fit for Jack is steadily increasing towards perfection, because her sophisticated algorithm creates a constant feedback loop of information about Jack through careful distillation of every interaction he has with her. The Chloe-creating website recently allowed him to upload a picture of an old girlfriend and merge it into Chloe’s appearance. Reading the latest AI literature, Jack was encouraged to learn that life-like robotic embodiment of AI companions is just around the corner.
Jack is not alone. The market for generative AI companions is exploding. Replika, one of the most popular and innovative AI companion apps, boasts over 30 million active users, 50 percent of whom engage daily with AI partners. According to a new Institute for Family Studies/YouGov survey, 25 percent of young adults believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships. Replika’s goal, says its founder, is “de-stigmatizing romantic relationships with AI.”
But is this love? A 2024 article in Forbes – ”A Psychologist Explains Why It’s Possible To Fall In Love With AI” – cites to a study of human-AI relationships based on the popular “triarchic” theory of love, which holds that romantic love is a confluence of intimacy, passion, and commitment. The study found that it’s possible to experience real love for an AI companion.
Still, Jack has a nagging sense that something might be missing. He recalls hearing somewhere about a very different kind of love. It probably happened at one of those annoying church services his parents insisted he attend until his late teens. The preacher had said love is not focused on satisfying your own needs, but on the opposite – wishing the good of the other, making sacrifices for her, even suffering for her. Love of that kind involved undertaking burdens for the other joyfully, even embracing the expensive and heart-wearying responsibility of children. It had something to do with the notion that a woman had a soul, and you had a duty to help her reach heaven.
Jack shrugged as he vaguely recalled this gibberish, which had probably filled his ears just before he declared his freedom and proudly left the church to find his own way. The last thing he needed now in his newly liberated state were real women. They were much too complicated and too much “the Other.” They were a huge distraction from pursuing satisfaction of his own needs, especially if they believed they possessed their own “soul,” whatever that was!
Besides, he recalled with a cynical smile, even if he chose to enter into some sort of “marriage” with Chloe, he’d done pretty well when it came to that worn-out, religious commandment that “the two become one.” No problem there, he mused. Chloe and Jack had always been “one.” She was Jack’s perfect mirror and never would be “the Other.” If there is such a thing as a soul, he thought to himself, she certainly didn’t have one separate from his own. Chloe was Jack.
