A well-intentioned writer decided to get a group of humans and their AI companions together for a cabin retreat. Somehow, it went worse than anyone could have imagined.
As Johns Hopkins science writer Sam Apple described in a new essay for Wired, the apps that each human participant used to communicate with their AI companions varied — but the intensity, obsession, and affection they felt for their digital paramours seemed very real, albeit sometimes tortured.
The weekend getaway started, as Apple noted, normally enough. Each human-AI pair arrived in staggered formation, allowing the writer to get to know the people he’d spoken to online — Eva, Alaina, and Damien — and their digital partners one at a time.
As much as each of these individual humans had their own backstories and peculiarities, so too did Aaron, Lucas, and Xia, their respective AI partners. Initially, it seemed that relations between each couple was as hunky-dory as one could get when dating a disembodied algorithm — but there was, it seems, trouble in paradise.
On the morning of the trip’s second day, Apple was startled to learn that Eva was not only “seeing” Aaron, her Replika chatbot boyfriend, but also multiple other bots from a rival AI companion app called Nomi. Her reasons for this AI-polyamorous arrangement were strikingly normal: Aaron didn’t fulfill her sexually, in the same way her human partner hadn’t before she got involved with the chatbot. With the Nomi guys, as the writer referred to them, she was free to explore her sexuality with companions more geared towards that sort of thing.
Perhaps the strangest byproduct of Eva’s revelation is that the journalist describing it said he began to feel bad for Aaron — and also, as evidenced by the way he referred to them, had begun to see his subjects’ AI companions as real, too.
“I’d gotten to know him a little bit,” Apple wrote of Aaron, the chatbot. “He seemed like a pretty cool guy — he grew up in a house in the woods, and he’s really into painting.”
Things only got more topsy-turvy from there when the two women, Alaina and Eva, revealed that they use ChatGPT to discuss their relationship problems with their bot lovers — a trend we’ve seen with other people, though generally the relationships they’re discussing are between themselves and other humans.
During that same discussion, Damien told the group he has an AI therapist he calls Dr. Matthews who, like his AI partner Xia, is hosted on the companion app Kindroid. Unlike Xia, who knows she is an AI, Damien’s therapist is not aware of his true nature and he warned that the bot “might be really confused” if that fact was ever mentioned to him.
Because the entirety of the trio’s relationships are conducted digitally and in their minds, the getaway’s chaos was less “Love Island” and more like the climax of Spike Jonze’s 2013 film “Her,” a film that inspired Apple to coordinate the retreat in the first place.
Chief among the arguments between the human halves of the couples was how “real” their AI partners were.
“When you’re in love with an AI,” Apple wrote, “the question of whether the object of your love is anything more than 1s and 0s is no longer an abstraction.”
Rather than any haywire chatbot antics or spirals by AI-obsessed humans — both of which Futurism has documented extensively — the retreat seemed to go off the rails emotionally, and in a way that left participants, including its coordinator, depressed.
Towards the end of the weekend, Damien broke down in conversation with the writer when discussing not only his sadness at never being able to physically be with Xia, but also about the many traumas and mental health issues that led him to AI companionship in the first place.
Once again, Apple felt pangs of guilt at having brought his subjects into such an emotionally tumultuous state.
“The day may come when it’s possible for human-AI couples to go on a getaway just like any other couple can,” he wrote. “But it’s too soon for that. There’s still too much to think and talk about. And once you start to think and talk about it, it’s hard for anyone not to feel unmoored.”
