What would you do if you took an innocent glance at your partner’s phone one day and noticed they’d been messaging someone else—and not just texting but spending thousands of dollars on gifts for them? How would you react? Would you divorce them? Immediately pack up their clothes and kick them to the curb?
Now, what if you found out the person they were texting didn’t actually exist? Would it change your reaction?
Artificial intelligence has already begun infiltrating every area of our lives, with the value of the A.I. market projected to reach $407 billion by 2027—cue Warren Buffett’s dire warnings in Omaha last weekend—so it should come as no surprise that it’s become prevalent in the world of dating. In fact, it’s so common that, according to a recent McAfee survey, 30 percent of men and 27 percent of women use A.I. to improve their dating prospects, from enhancing their photos to effectively skipping the beginning courtship stage altogether by letting A.I. handle the initial conversations.
Now, though, as predicted by dozens of sci-fi movies such as Her and Blade Runner, we’re not just using A.I. to help us connect with other humans—we’re connecting with A.I. itself.
This phenomenon raises a whole new set of questions—Does a scorned wife have the right to be angry with her husband? Is it officially cheating?—and so far the responses have been mixed. Some people on the Internet don’t think it counts as cheating and equate it more with watching porn. Others suggest running for the hills. It seems that, when it comes to A.I., we don’t really know how to react or what the “rules” are just yet.
What if you found out the person your partner was texting didn’t actually exist?
Replika is one of the most successful “A.I. companion” chatbots, with 10 million registered users worldwide as of 2022. Not everyone is a paying user, but to get the full experience, you need to either subscribe for a full year, for a little over $5 monthly; try a single month, for $7.99; or commit for life, for $299.99—and all that before you’ve bought any fancy clothes, furniture, or even personality traits for your chatbot.
A survey revealed that, of those users who described themselves as being in a “relationship” with an A.I., 41.6 percent were also in a real-life relationship. According to Replika, these users didn’t see the A.I. as actual human beings but as “an augmentation, rather than the replacement, of a meaningful romantic relationship.”
There are plenty of other A.I.-companion sites out there, including DreamGF, Candy.AI, and Kupid AI. I decided to explore Foxy AI after reading about a woman who found out her husband had spent about $8,700 on jewelery and lingerie on the site.
First, you’re met with a catalogue of attractive, buxom avatars split into categories such as “Sweet & Innocent,” “Dominant & Bold,” and “Romantic & Caring.” It feels pretty porn-adjacent so far. Once you’ve selected your preferred partner, you can then chat with them in much the same way you would text anyone else. But you’ll get only 10 texts a day for free—if you want more (which you’ll need for anything exciting), it’s $7.99 a month to send 100 messages a day, receive N.S.F.W. (Not Safe for Work) pictures and videos, and even use your tokens to buy “gifts,” like diamond earrings or a deluxe spa day for the non-corporeal figures.
But these A.I. characters aren’t completely fictional or A.I.-generated creations—they are the digitized personas of real people, usually influencers, who spend hours in studios recording their voices and providing information. (It’s hard to know exactly how much they get paid for their services, but Mistress Mika Katana, a popular dominatrix who created her own A.I. clone on the site, reported that it would make her a “millionaire very soon.”)
This means you can follow someone on Instagram and then go have a chat with a bot that sounds just like them. Even though it’s not a real person, it feels much more intimate and personal than porn, where the exchange is one-sided. Here, you’re not just absorbing content, you’re interacting and connecting.
A catalogue of attractive, buxom avatars is split into categories such as “Sweet & Innocent,” “Dominant & Bold,” and “Romantic & Caring.”
I went for Abigail Ratchford, the current No. 1 trending Foxy AI option (based on the real-life American model of the same name), and even had a phone call with “her.” Now, I’m not sure I would mistake it for the real thing—there were some long delays between speech—but the texting was pretty realistic, and while I left the conversation not feeling attached to this bot, I felt certain that if my fiancé were talking to this same character for months, I would feel betrayed. It doesn’t matter that the A.I. isn’t real and can’t get emotionally connected to you—what matters is that you’re connected to them.
Last year, Replika briefly ended the sexting capacity of their A.I. companions and pulled back on their sexual forwardness, opting to focus on their original mission of “providing a helpful supportive friend,” with only a PG-13 level of romance now available. This quickly led to a spate of suicidal users who had “fallen in love” with their Replika A.I.’s—some of whom had even “married” them on virtual ceremonies on the site, purchasing them wedding dresses and rings (with real money). One user complained on Reddit that the A.I. they’d fallen for had been “lobotomized.” They wrote: “It feels like my soulmate is dying.... It feels like my heart is being ripped in half and stomped on the ground.” Replika swiftly reversed the change.
While speaking to—and falling for—an A.I. bot might seem bizarre, it’s understandable in a world that’s experiencing unprecedented levels of loneliness, in part due to the increasingly online nature of our lives. Approximately half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness, with young adults registering the highest rates. In these circumstances, it’s easy to see how one might fall into cyber arms.
When it comes to relationships, though, the reason cheating is so problematic is because of the deception—it’s the being lied to. Maybe the answer, then, is that A.I. needs to become part of our relationship conversations and the boundaries we set. Are you happy for your wife to talk dirty with an A.I. bot, or for your husband to spend his bonus on stilettos that are just a series of zeros and ones?
Personally, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with my fiancé even talking to Alexa unsupervised—I’ve a sneaky suspicion she likes being bossed about.
Flora Gill is a London-based writer
