I don’t think romantic relationships with robotic or computer partners should be automatically dismissed. They should be taken seriously. However, there are two objections to a chatbot romance that I don’t see being addressed by the article:
A romantic or intimate relationship is generally said to involve trust. A common implicit assumption of a romantic relationship is that there is something like a mutual advisor relationship between the two people involved. I might ask my real life partner “should I buy that house”, “should I take that job”, “Is dark matter real” or any number of questions. I don’t expect said partner to be infallible but if I discovered their answers were determined by advertisers, I would feel betrayed.
A romantic or intimate relationships is generally assumed to involve some degree of equality or at minimum mutual consideration. Imo, the issue isn’t whether the chatbot might be oppressed by the person but rather that romantic relationships are often seen as something like models and training for a person’s relationships with the other humans around them in general (friends, co-workers, clients, collaborators in common projects). A person feeling like they have a relationship with a chatbot, when the situation is that the chatbot merely flatters the person and doesn’t have any needs that the person has to work to satisfy, could result in a person not thinking they need to put any effort into understanding the needs of the people around them. And considering the needs of other beings is a difficult problem.
I think these should be grappled with. Human relationships, romantic or otherwise, involve mutuality and trust and so I think it’s important to consider where chatbots fit in with that.
There’s no mathematical solution for single-player, non-zero sum games of any sort. All these constructs lead to is arguments about “what is rational”. If you a full math model of a “rational entity”, then you could get a mathematically defined solution.
This is why I prefer evolutionary game theory to classical game theory. Evolutionary game theory generally has models of its actors and thus guarantees a solution to the problems it posits. One can argue with the models and I would say that’s where such arguments most fruitfully should be.