People who fell in love with AI partners, and have virtual and even physical sex with them (e.g., with a sex doll and a VR headset that projects the visual features of the AI girlfriend on the doll), usually won’t seek real human relationships.
I don’t think we yet have enough data to say anything about what the usual case is like (I haven’t seen any representative studies of the relationship behavior of people falling in love with AI partners).
Disclaimer: I’m not a professional psychologist and mostly not familiar with literature, but the following propositions seem at least highly likely to me:
In human psychology, there is “romantic love” type of emotional relationship, which is exclusive in most people (serial monogamy), with only a minority of people finding themselves being truly in love with two other people simultaneously.
AI girlfriends who look like the hottest girls in the world won’t occupy any other niche in men’s psychology than “romantic love”. It’s not “pet love” or platonic love towards friends and family members. Human psychology won’t “spun up” new distinct type of love relationship because there is no driving force for this, except for knowing that AI partner is “not real”, which I think is a rather weak deterrent (moreover, this fact could even be seriously questioned soon).
There is a simple proof for the above: people fall into genuine romantic love very easily and very quickly from chat and (video) calls alone, “flesh and blood” meeting not required. To most people, even having only a chat and a few photographs of the person is enough to be able to fall in love, even phone calls or videos are not required. To some people, even having chat alone (or, in the old times, exchanging written letters), without even having a single photograph, is enough to fall in love with a person and to dream of nothing except meeting that person.
Thus, falling in love as in movie “Her” is not just “hypothetical”, or applies to tiny slice of weirdos, it’s rather plausible from the historical perspective, when falling in love upon exchanging texts alone was at least relatively common. Note that with AI partners, this will soon be exacerbated by that fact that they will be completely unique, in terms of their personality (character.ai), looks (simps.ai), and voice, generated specifically for the user. This will add the feeling of exclusivity and will make falling in love with these AIs psychologically much more “justifiable” for people (as people will justify it for themselves in their mind).
People can be in love and be deeply troubled by that. In previous times (and still in some parts of the world), this would often be interclass love (The Titanic style). Or, this could be clash with critical life decisions, about country of living, having or not having children, acceptable risk in the partner (e.g., partner does extreme sports or fighting), etc. True, this does lead to breakups, but they are at least extremely painful or even traumatic to people. And many people could never overcome this, keeping love towards those who they were forced to leave for the rest of their lifes, even after they find new love. This experience may sound beautiful and dramatic but it’s literally zero fun and people would prefer not to go through this. So, it’s likely that at least for sizeable part of AI partner userbase attempts to “abandon” it and find a human partner instead will be like that. Effectively, the reason is similar to what often happens in human pairs: child-free falls in love with a person who wants kids but they can’t “convince” each other. Or, one of the partner can’t have kids for medical reasons.
Which of the above points seem less than highly likely to you?
I think these are generally reasonable, but that the prevalence of polygamous societies is an indication that the first point is significantly culturally influenced, e.g. Wikipedia:
Worldwide, different societies variously encourage, accept or outlaw polygamy. In societies which allow or tolerate polygamy, polygyny is the accepted form in the vast majority of cases. According to the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook, of 1,231 societies noted between from 1960 to 1980, 588 had frequent polygyny, 453 had occasional polygyny, 186 were monogamous, and 4 had polyandry[5] – although more recent research found some form of polyandry in 53 communities, which is more common than previously thought.[6] In cultures which practice polygamy, its prevalence among that population often correlates with social class and socioeconomic status.[7] Polygamy (taking the form of polygyny) is most common in a region known as the “polygamy belt” in West Africa and Central Africa, with the countries estimated to have the highest polygamy prevalence in the world being Burkina Faso, Mali, Gambia, Niger and Nigeria.[8]
I don’t think we yet have enough data to say anything about what the usual case is like (I haven’t seen any representative studies of the relationship behavior of people falling in love with AI partners).
Disclaimer: I’m not a professional psychologist and mostly not familiar with literature, but the following propositions seem at least highly likely to me:
In human psychology, there is “romantic love” type of emotional relationship, which is exclusive in most people (serial monogamy), with only a minority of people finding themselves being truly in love with two other people simultaneously.
AI girlfriends who look like the hottest girls in the world won’t occupy any other niche in men’s psychology than “romantic love”. It’s not “pet love” or platonic love towards friends and family members. Human psychology won’t “spun up” new distinct type of love relationship because there is no driving force for this, except for knowing that AI partner is “not real”, which I think is a rather weak deterrent (moreover, this fact could even be seriously questioned soon).
There is a simple proof for the above: people fall into genuine romantic love very easily and very quickly from chat and (video) calls alone, “flesh and blood” meeting not required. To most people, even having only a chat and a few photographs of the person is enough to be able to fall in love, even phone calls or videos are not required. To some people, even having chat alone (or, in the old times, exchanging written letters), without even having a single photograph, is enough to fall in love with a person and to dream of nothing except meeting that person.
Thus, falling in love as in movie “Her” is not just “hypothetical”, or applies to tiny slice of weirdos, it’s rather plausible from the historical perspective, when falling in love upon exchanging texts alone was at least relatively common. Note that with AI partners, this will soon be exacerbated by that fact that they will be completely unique, in terms of their personality (character.ai), looks (simps.ai), and voice, generated specifically for the user. This will add the feeling of exclusivity and will make falling in love with these AIs psychologically much more “justifiable” for people (as people will justify it for themselves in their mind).
People can be in love and be deeply troubled by that. In previous times (and still in some parts of the world), this would often be interclass love (The Titanic style). Or, this could be clash with critical life decisions, about country of living, having or not having children, acceptable risk in the partner (e.g., partner does extreme sports or fighting), etc. True, this does lead to breakups, but they are at least extremely painful or even traumatic to people. And many people could never overcome this, keeping love towards those who they were forced to leave for the rest of their lifes, even after they find new love. This experience may sound beautiful and dramatic but it’s literally zero fun and people would prefer not to go through this. So, it’s likely that at least for sizeable part of AI partner userbase attempts to “abandon” it and find a human partner instead will be like that. Effectively, the reason is similar to what often happens in human pairs: child-free falls in love with a person who wants kids but they can’t “convince” each other. Or, one of the partner can’t have kids for medical reasons.
Which of the above points seem less than highly likely to you?
I think these are generally reasonable, but that the prevalence of polygamous societies is an indication that the first point is significantly culturally influenced, e.g. Wikipedia: