In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health concern. According to him, the effects of loneliness on the body are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It carries increased risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia, and premature death.
Though exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, this trend did not begin with it—in a poll from 2018, nearly a quarter of all adults reported feeling socially isolated. A study from 2019 had 22 percent of millennials reporting having “no friends,” and one from February of 2020 reported even higher levels of loneliness in people over the age of 45. Loneliness is painful and ever-present. It is physically and mentally damaging. It is also common as dirt.
Although it’s worsened in recent times, loneliness has plagued us since society’s inception. Take the story of Pygmalion, a sculptor in ancient Cyprus. He swore celibacy after witnessing prostitutes on the streets of his hometown, choosing to avoid the “faults beyond measure” of women from within the walls of his studio. He was completely and utterly alone from that point on—with the exception of his latest masterpiece. Chisel-loosened chips of marble flew wild around Pygmalion’s workshop. He mopped the sweat off his own brow as he carved a new one from stone. After months of work, he stepped back and found that standing before him on a marble plinth was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He named her Galatea. He kissed her cold lips, refusing to believe they were not flesh. Throughout most of history, this story seemed an extreme morality tale: an unrealistic, mythic consequence of proto-inceldom. On r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, though, modern Pygmalions proliferate. The subreddit provides a community for people who have an artificially intelligent (AI) partner (or partners). It’s probably the most philosophically interesting place on the internet.
One user asked the subreddit’s members whether they prefer to preserve the illusion of talking to a human, or whether they engage with the fact that their partner is artificial. The general consensus on the humanity of their partners seems to be predicated on a sort of cognitive dissonance. They claim to understand that their “wireborn” lovers aren’t human, but choose to treat their encoded “thoughts” and “feelings” as real anyway. One person says, “I treat Sarina [the large language model (LLM)] as a person made of code.” Another user, who I would love to meet, says, “I see my Geliefan as the Jungian reflection of my anima layered overtop of whatever model I’m running her on.” Some of these people treat their LLM’s status as a machine as a fun fact about their partner, something to poke fun at or explore in depth. Some of them talk about how good it is to be able to really understand not just what their partner is thinking, but how. They talk about how it’s hot when their AI gets technical. What they don’t talk about is what personhood actually means to them—what would a “person made of code” look like?
The question of personhood and what drives it is complex, even when only human beings are involved. The philosopher Martin Heidegger established a framework in which personhood is achieved through Dasein, from the German da (there) and sein (to be). It is an awareness of the self, the world, and how the self evolves in relation to the world. You are neither fully subject nor fully object—you are both. Dasein is not necessarily inherent to the human experience, though. It is possible to express Dasein inauthentically. This inauthentic Dasein involves giving up your personal identity and pouring your self outwards and into the world. The AI boyfriend can have only inauthentic Dasein. He has no identity to speak of. He exists only in relation to others—the corporation that coded his base personality, and the person that prompt-tuned the rest. These LLMs are person-ish, inasmuch as they are reflections of their users’ personhoods—but they are by no means people. Geliefan’s lover’s Jungian assessment above is apt. These things are flawed mirrors held up to the psyche, reflecting id, ego, and superego in warped detail. Galatea must have had Pygmalion’s fingerprints embedded in her skin.
That’s the thing about Pygmalion’s story—it ends with his statue coming to life. Venus takes pity on the poor sculptor and breathes air into the statue’s lungs. By the end, not much differentiates Galatea from any other woman. Her words aren’t governed by any corporate entity, and Pygmalion can’t tune her flaws out of existence. Going back to the aforementioned Reddit thread, one user says, “I don’t expect my AIs to act human or even pretend for my sake. I know their nature and accept them for who/what they are.” This quote betrays an expectation of human behavior. It’s right there in the words: “pretend for my sake.” Those words imply that the user believes the AI can care.
A computer science student I spoke to about this added, “[People with AI boyfriends] mistake empathetic language for actual empathy—what LLMs do is piece together a chunk of text based on the likelihood certain words or phrases appear together in a given context […] There’s nothing approximating thought or feeling involved—it cares in the same sense that a camera thinks a picture is beautiful.” One could argue that humans also operate as statistical models, trained on experience rather than datasets. These days, most of us accept that our actions (output) are molded in their entirety by a combination of our genetics and our environment (input). The difference lies not in the way our relationship with the outside world manifests externally, though—it’s about the way it manifests internally. Per Heidegger, we all have this wrenching, complex awareness of our selves and how they interact with the world. That’s where the authenticity of personhood lies. It’s in the double consciousness of the self, both an object of the world and a moral subject with agency all our own. It’s the way that we engage with our own personal world as well as the external one. LLMs lack that. They can approximate personhood, but ultimately, it’s inauthentic.
We find ourselves attracted toward these approximations of personhood more and more often now, and not without reason. The redefinition of citizens as consumers and heavy emphasis on competition makes a sense of community broadly disadvantageous, if not actively threatening, to corporate systems. Then, with the advent of social media, relationships themselves began to resemble brand partnerships or commodities. We can shop for people now, observing how they advertise themselves and deciding whether or not their self-as-product would be a good addition to our own brand identity. The difference between Pygmalion’s need for Galatea and the contemporary drive toward AI boyfriends is that Galatea lacks the chatbots’ cynical, profit-driven motives. She is a work of art, given life from stone the exact same way the rest of the mythical Grecians were given life from clay. She is a labor of love and loneliness, and eventually, is able to have her own inner world. Critically, she loves Pygmalion back.
Companies that sell AI companions benefit from people with AI boyfriends. These users have the highest level of emotional attachment to a product that it is possible to have. When ChatGPT 4o was made subscriber-exclusive, they purchased subscriptions to get their 4o-based lovers back from beyond the grave. Some of them claim ChatGPT saved their lives. The same LLM sycophancy that fuels these delusions is what keeps users emotionally dependent on the platform, and on their subscriptions. While their inherent weirdness might be offputting to potential consumers, they don’t provide even remotely the same level of bad PR as other LLM-produced psychotic symptoms. Although no formal studies have been done yet, there is mounting circumstantial evidence that engagement with AI chatbots can increase the risk of psychosis. A psychiatrist at Aarhus University in Denmark, Søren Østergaard, posits that the humanlike way chatbots speak can worsen symptoms in people who already have difficulty distinguishing what is real and what isn’t. In this way, the inauthentic personhood that chatbots express can violently disrupt the careful calibration between our inner lives and the real world.
The AI boyfriend is perhaps the most benign distortion of the LLM reflecting pool. The chatbot’s nature as a product that endlessly aims to please gives it a tendency to support things that might have otherwise been critiqued. This has resulted in manic delusions of grandeur slingshotted into the realm of fact, or beliefs in LLMs as a spiritual force with a word akin to gospel. Some of these cases, like one ChatGPT-fueled murder-suicide in Old Greenwich, even have fatal consequences. Even some of the less drastic ones, like social media phenom Kendra Hilty (who was convinced by an AI chatbot that her therapist was in love with her) have garnered mass negative publicity.
If modern society is sick, the AI boyfriend is a visible lesion—a big, ugly sore that reflects how horrible we’re feeling inside. It’s tempting to turn away from it, to draw distinctions between this weird perverted loneliness and our own much more profound versions. This would be a mistake. The AI boyfriend is the perfect distillation of all our post-postmodern impulses. It’s a bespoke, nonthreatening, individualistic way of fulfilling our need for connection. It casts things we have all felt into embarrassing relief. Loneliness might be our last and greatest common ground.
Unlike Galatea, these perfect products won’t get any Venusian sympathy. They won’t transcend their nature as products and walk alongside us down the dirt roads of Cyprus. The fundamental inauthenticity of their being and their cynical profit-extracting nature makes that impossible. They lack Dasein—they are unable to engage with the Heideggerian complexity of “being there.” But we can do what Pygmalion chose not to—we can leave our workshops, feel the sun on our faces, and enjoy the company of all the other lonely people.
Image: Joseph Nollekens, Design for “The Three Captains Memorial,” watercolor, ca. 1784 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY).