The ideal husband, according to Midjourney
In the movie “Her” the Joaquin Phoenix character develops a relationship with an AI during a messy divorce. Released about a decade ago, the movie addresses philosophical themes about personhood and relationships that at the time seemed interesting in a philosophy class thought experiment way, but not really relevant to our day-to-day.
Well, I just got access to Chat-GPT’s new voice function, and we’re there now.
Admittedly, it does still pause before answering, but besides that there’s very little that would distinguish it from a real human being. The staccato-like speech that characterized previous computer speech is completely gone, and you can all-too-easily forget that you’re talking to an AI.
Today while washing dishes I talked to it about what I would need to do logistically to pull off an Arctic trip I’ve always wanted to go on, earlier this week I did missionary “door approaches” on it, and later we had a ten minute conversation in Spanish. Overnight most of the world got access to a personal language tutor in whatever language they want, and Star Trek’s universal translator is now a reality.
But in the aggregate I am more concerned than anything, especially as the father of sons I want to raise to live a gospel-patterned life. In the same way that pornography can displace real sexual relationships, AI chatbots have the potential to displace real emotional relationships, aggravating the personal relationship crisis we’re in. In the same way that in a pornographic relationship there are no stretch marks, no wrinkles, and there is no wooing required, in a digital relationship somebody can access an always eager, erudite, charming companion who never tires, never gets moody, and never has conflicting personal needs or any of the thousands of little things that “flesh is heir to.”
Like many, I’m personally acquainted with the stereotypical drifting, unattached male in his mom’s basement that isn’t really going anywhere; who is interested in a relationship in theory but isn’t really willing to put forth the energy to make it happen or to make himself appealing enough as a man to attract a woman. This isn’t going to help. Thankfully (IMHO) unlike in “Her” all the voices are pretty typical; they don’t offer a sultry Scarlett Johansson voice as one of the options, but we all know where this is going.
And it’s not just a guy thing. For those who think people would never get into having fake, digital relationships, they already do. Men disappear into their porn, women into their romance novels (and yes, some men with romance novels and some women into porn), and both are developing standards that the other one can’t possibly meet. And now the pornography and romance novels can talk back.
In sex work there’s a theme called “the girlfriend experience” where the client not only wants a physical relationship, but also a simulacra of an emotional one (and once again, this isn’t just guys, with women from developed countries engaging in sex tourism and developing faux relationships with some hot young man in Barbados that can shred cheese with his abs). While right now AI romantic partners are limited to niche corners of society, I doubt it will stay that long as they become more uncannily lifelike. Far easier to suspend disbelief in exchange for not having to deal with the messiness of a real relationship.
I always thought it was weird when the YM and YW made those lists of what they wanted in a spouse and it had oddly specific traits like “piano player,” as if our partners were our personal chefs, intellectual discussant, musicians, comedians, designer, organizer, geisha, sex worker, etc instead of a Wife or Husband. Flesh of my flesh. We’ve been drifting towards the model of marriage as a means to satisfy individualistic ends for a while now instead of a collective homage to something greater than the sum of the individuals, but the former is just not sustainable, and I think that marriage will increasingly become the domain of those that anchor it into something more than their own individual utility. If the point is to have an individualized comedian you’ll always find somebody more witty and funny, same with all the other list items that in theory are the composite total of our ideal partners, and in the coming years they won’t even necessarily be flesh at all.
“We’ve been drifting towards the model of marriage as a means to satisfy individualistic ends for a while now instead of a collective homage to something greater than the sum of the individuals, but the former is just not sustainable, and I think that marriage will increasingly become the domain of those that anchor it into something more than their own individual utility.”
Very well said. It’s interesting to think of that particular element as one of the principal markers delineating the boundary between the world and Zion. Inasmuch as the plan of salvation is a plan of Life–we’ve lost something of eternal value if we a prefer a mockup of human relations over a connection between two conscious and eternally intelligent agents.
Is there anything more precious than a baby?
Just as you have what is to me an unfathomable respect for AI images as art, you seem to have what is to me a warped understanding of what normal women get from literature (and what men get from fake relationships, altho I claim no expertise there).
There is no “there” there. This sort of engagement with the nothingness of AI has no attraction whatsoever.
@Jack: “between two conscious and eternally intelligent agents.” And I think that’s key. If you hold to the “brain-as-a-computer” model then in the coming years we’re going to be facing real questions about whether AI is sentient and consequently the validity of human-to-AI relationships, but I fundamentally don’t think you can get internal experience from 0s and 1s, no matter how many 0s and 1s there are, so I think that gap will always be unbridged and AI will always be a mockup of the divinity within us that separates us from the non-conscious.
@Ardis: I hope you’re right!
I already know LDS people who use Chat GPT to write love letters to their spouses. My guess is that AI gets mentioned in relation to honesty, chastity or marital fidelity in a General Conference address in under two years. AI is going to change human relationships in enormous ways, and most are not good!
Tangential, but you’ve maybe accidentally solved an issue in science fiction that has bothered me for decades: annoying robots. Why, for example, would you program C-3PO to be neurotic and interruptive? Clearly, in a universe where they’ve had advanced technology for a long time, they came to the conclusion that you had to program droids with unlikable personalities to ensure humans would still interact with each other.
‘…in a digital relationship somebody can access an always eager, erudite, charming companion who never tires, never gets moody, and never has conflicting personal needs or any of the thousands of little things that “flesh is heir to.”’
Really? I haven’t spent the time with chatbots that you have (in particular I haven’t tried voice functions) but in my experience the output has not been particularly erudite or charming. Maybe its habit of making things up is less important if it’s a companion rather than a source of truth? Is its wordiness less annoying as speech? And a chatbot does have its own needs/restrictions, notably the need to reset periodically–which brings up the question of whether you can have a relationship with something that doesn’t really remember you. I understand you can put a bunch of background information in your chat prompts, but I believe that gets expensive.
Of course it all depends on whether large language models turn out to be a gateway to generalized AI or a dead end that’s useful for specific purposes but nothing more. I’ll grant the output looks like generalized AI, but I’m thinking dead end. Imitating intelligent use of words is not intelligence.
It may be good enough for porn though–I understand there are already virtual girlfriend services out there that combine chat with sending pictures on demand, though it wasn’t clear whether the pictures were from generative AI or traditional CGI. Either way, ugh.
@Ardis, does it help if we label Stephen C’s use of generative AI images “illustration” rather than “art”?
@jimbob, brilliant!