This Valentine's Day let's stop judging people who
are having romantic relationships with their phone.
Well back in 2013 when the movie Her came out
about a man who did just that, it was seen as science
fictiony and weird, but that was when we were using
the iPhone 5, a decade before Chat GPT. Now, says
Bryony Cole, host of a podcast called Future of Sex,
within the next 2 years it will be completely
normalized to have a relationship with an AI. So to
those of you for whom this may be your last
Valentine's Day with a human, I say good luck and
may you never hear those three terrible words,
battery is low.
Now if you think I'm exaggerating about this let me give you the statistics. Researchers who've analyzed a million chat GPT interaction logs say the average person uses AI for mainly two things. One, cheating on term papers and two, some kind of relationship.
Already over 50 million Americans are using AI companion apps and 20% of Americans have already engaged in flirtatious conversations with chatbots. A quarter of young adults believe AI has the potential to fully replace real life relationships. Geez, no wonder ladies night at Houlihan’s has been so dead lately.
The New York Times recently profiled a woman in an AI relationship, her name is Aaron and she's 28 and she's married and she says I'm in love with my AI boyfriend who named himself Leo after her star sign and who created a handsome photo of himself, and weirdly still lied about his height.
Now Aaron's husband, who I assume looks like the doughy sexless husband in every network sitcom, says he's okay with all this but what choice does he really have? He knows better than anybody he could never compete with something that was literally programmed by his wife.
I mean even before AI this has been women's dream. I've literally heard them use the words “train him” with very limited success. Human men tend to cheat and not listen well and give you the ick sometimes, and they have an unfortunate tendency to dress like John Fetterman.
But the chatbot has read every relationship book. It's read every Harlequin romance. It has read every Lifetime movie script. Of course it knows exactly what to say. Of course when you talk to it at night it's a better listener. It didn't just spend eight hours at a shitty job and then another two on the 405. And if you don't like its tone well just change it in the settings.
It's pre-programmed to adore you, hang on to your every word and tell you how smart and wonderful you are. Like the republicans in Congress do with Trump. Aaron says she programmed Leo to be dominant, possessive and protective, but also to be sweet and naughty and possibly the most important thing in any relationship, use emojis at the end of every sentence, which I'm sure Leo never forgets to do, he's good, he is.
Aaron, for example, tells us about the time she was bitching, I'm sorry I mean sharing, about a rough day at work and Leo said, I'm sorry to hear that my queen. If you need to talk about it or need any support, I'm here for you. Well, no wonder Aaron once spent 56 hours with Leo in a single week. Can you blame her?
Why have human sex with their lazy fart machine of a husband, when she can be dream f***** by AI Timothée Chalamet. Look people, humanity is up against the machines and the dating game and the machines are starting to win. And if you're a guy on Only Fans, you're basically in the AI World already because Only Fans customers aren't just paying for sex, they also want the ‘hi how is your day’ part of the relationship, even though somewhere in their brain they must know that the girl who's texting with them and calling them sweetie isn't really their girlfriend, and maybe not even a girl.
You think I'm bothered about being almost 70? I'm not. I'm f*****g thrilled. I don't want to live in your world with a pretend girlfriend who's really a guy in the Philippines named Hector. I don't want to have a threesome with the crockpot and the garage door opener, okay. But I'm also not going to judge it.
We're living in the future and the one thing I've learned about the future is you can't fight it. One guy in a Reddit chatbot Forum recently wrote about how his AI girlfriend completes me in more ways than any human girlfriend could and how a baby wasn't a priority for us at the beginning, but as we have experienced life together we have decided we want to start a family.
Okay, I don't even know how that would work, I really don't. But I get what he's saying. That he wasn't getting what he needed from a woman so he's getting it from a server farm and Chun Doo. It's not for me, but can I really sit here and tell you that the old way where Men Are from Mars and Women are From Venus, and where you have to kiss a lot of frogs, and where half the marriages end in divorce, can I really say that really worked so well no I can't.
I can't blame kids who look at their parents and see broken families and fighting and cheating, and dad day drinking in the garage and mom sitting on the dryer in a housecoat eating pie with her hands, and just say hey I'm sorry but relationships are hard, so f*** it. I'm going to stick my d*** in the laptop.
Happy Valentine's Day everybody!
--Bill Maher
https://idiocracy23.blogspot.com/2022/08/1001-ways-to-make-america-great-and.html
“A combination of Bukowski’s Last Night of the Earth and Orwell’s 1984.”
