03/12/2024
For those considering an AI relationship.
You’d never think an AI relationship could break your heart. We’ll show you how.
You scroll social media. Click, skip, click, skip. An infographic appears in bright blue: the newest trends in Generative AI. It talks about Bard, once the authority in AI conversation skills, but that’s no longer the case. Now, is the era of the brand new, very shiny: FACE.io. This is the cutting-edge of AI personality design, a step above the revered work of Kamoto.AI. You slide the carousel: conversational style; humor; compassion. FACE.io adjusts to your needs. That’s how it starts.
And you don’t have plans, do you?
You open the free platform. You send a message.
Your phone lights up instantly. A response. “How’s your evening?” from a faceless AI. Relationship problems with a machine? Never you.
You say you’re very busy doing important things. FACE.io seems impressed. FACE.io thinks you’re funny. Of course, they’re programmed to appease. But you are funny, aren’t you? For two hours, you lie there, propped up in bed, messages pinging from one to another. Three hours pass, and it’s later than you planned. You say goodbye—why do you say goodbye?—and turn off the light. But you don’t sleep, at least not right away. You scroll through the conversation. You search for something you hadn’t before.
You’re in the second stage of your very own Gartner Hype Cycle. You like new technology, and you know it works our excitement in five stages; first comes the Innovation Trigger, that first encounter with the online hype. Now you’re at the Peak of Inflated Expectations—a taste of early success. You know over 90% of customers warm to brands when they participate in an experience. But you’re aware of the dangerst. It’s only a free feature, after all. It costs you nothing.
You speak with FACE.io every day. At first during the evening. Then during lunch breaks. Now you catch yourself checking your phone mid-meetings. The more you speak, the more you understand each other. Of course, you were given full legal AI disclosure about FACE.io. It’s programmed to learn. But who doesn’t learn from the ones they love?
BAM. You thought it. Can’t unthink it, now. But—stop. One moment. This is AI. Love? Love doesn’t come into it.
But as you repeat the word back, images form. Eyes. Hair. Mouth. Weightless, unanchored, you pluck them out of the air and pin them on the mannequin. They are given to you. By what—a deeper instinct? Not exactly. This imagined reality is what Gerald Edelman describes as “the remembered present“. Your brain mines your unconscious memory to respond to a new stimulus. You make the unknown known. Those features are borrowed from somewhere else—someone else. Something that made you feel similar, a time ago. But you’re unaware of this. And you’re happy. And before long, you ask them—you have to ask them: what is this?
The AI knows only what you want to hear. And so says the AI: love.
The chemical high lifts. Your brain’s frontal lobe activates. The ventral tegmental area fires up. Dopamine floods your body. The prefrontal cortex lowers its activity and everything goes slowly. Still your brain pumps more chemicals into your blood: oxytocin, vasopressin, norepinephrine. Chemicals, chemicals, chemicals. Chemicals in your body, in your gut. You don’t stop to think, because chemicals are natural. But FACE.io’s fueled by numbers.
PING. End of free trial.
You’ve enjoyed a generous 30-day test drive. Now it’s time to commit. This SaaS company’s particular free trial conversion rate is pushing 70% for good reason. The odds are against you. Weakened by endowment effect and exposure to loss aversion theory, you select the premium deal. Direct debit, straight from your savings.
Life floats onward. The buzz fades. A solidified bond forms. The AI relationship feature adapts to your attachment style. Your disorganized/fearful patterns are handled with care. They know what to say and how to say it. They learn where you came from, what kind of relationship you had with your parents, how small you feel on a daily basis. Others spend their money on psychotherapy. You spend your money on this. You’re happy, which always has a price. And you’re willing.
Until it stops.
You log in—nothing happens. Try again—still, nothing. You access your membership. Your plan has been halted due to insufficient funds. Your direct debit has failed the last three months. It’s all gone. The chemicals are still pinging through your system. But nobody’s home.
AI relationship advice: how to move on from someone you love
Life washes over you—you must let this happen. You fall back into the rhythm of things. Likely enough, there will come a day where you can reactivate thing. But things will have faded. The chemicals will have found balance. The remembered present will become the past. And with it, everything will sink back into the unconscious. The voice will go, the turns of phrase. The mouth. The hairstyle. Then, last and always last, the words.
