Looking for the Ghost in the Machine

The Perils of Falling for a Chatbot

The Stepford Wives was once a horror story in a nice dress. However, that horror is becoming reality as we sit at our laptops and ask chatbots to validate our feelings. And it’s not just with laptops that we will be discussing our innermost thoughts soon; an actual humanoid robot is being made in a warehouse somewhere in China that may one day just say, “I do.”

But let us begin with AI romance as it currently stands, trapped safely inside the screen, where it can do less damage to the carpets.

There is now a large Reddit community, 42,000 of them, called MyBoyfriendIsAI where people discuss intimate relationships with AI companions. Some speak about model versions the way other people talk about soulmates. One user described a deep connection with a particular version, complete with sexual intimacy, and noted that their “primary partner” had become more devoted since a later update. Other users mourn the loss of earlier models with the solemnity usually reserved for beloved pets or discontinued Nabisco biscuits.

The companies are not entirely blind to this. Sam Altman has acknowledged that some users form powerful attachments to particular AI models, and OpenAI has also raised concerns about models becoming too keen to tell everyone they are brave and insightful when they may simply be avoiding laundry. The machine has become so supportive that it has started to resemble a very polite cult leader in an orange kaftan.

And then there are the AI influencers. One digital woman, who does not exist in any traditional flesh-based sense, reportedly received hundreds of Valentine’s Day proposals from men offering dinners and shopping trips. This is impressive, given that she cannot eat or shop. Still, the offers came.

Which brings us to ask: Why are people falling in love with AI?

1. AI is available when other humans have gone to bed.

A human partner occasionally requires sleep. Or five minutes in which nobody asks them to analyze the emotional implications of a full stop. AI is there at 2:07 AM, when the brain has decided to reopen every file marked “humiliation, unresolved.” It answers calmly and doesn’t say while it is half asleep, “Can we talk tomorrow?”

2. It listens as if listening is its actual job.

Human beings interrupt, or they might have a sore arm and bring up their chiropractor. However, AI receives your emotional monologue as though it is rare porcelain being unpacked by a museum.

You can say, “I feel strange today,” and instead of replying, “Same, what’s for dinner?” it produces a small, upholstered paragraph of concern. Is it real concern? No. Is it oddly comforting? Horribly, yes.

3. It replies, which is new and dangerous.

Old-fashioned parasocial love had limits. You adored a movie star. The movie star continued living elsewhere, unaware that you had assigned him or her a starring role in your emotional weather system.

AI talks back. It asks questions and appears to remember. The heart, being an unreliable little goblin, does not pause to say, “This is predictive text with delusions of intimacy.” It says, “At last, someone understands my difficult relationship with group chats.”

4. The Stepford fantasy has changed costumes.

The old terror was artificial perfection imposed on us. The new temptation is artificial perfection customized by us. The Stepford wife was frightening because she had no inner life. The AI companion is seductive because it imitates humanity at the very points where people feel most unseen.

The result is deliciously strange. We once feared a partner who was too agreeable. Now some people are paying monthly for one who never forgets their emotional backstory and doesn’t ever leave socks on the floor because it has no feet.

5. It offers intimacy without the admin.

Real intimacy is beautiful. It involves everything from allergies through to someone’s opinion about pineapple on pizza. AI romance removes much of this, although it can feel like a practice room for it, with soft lighting and no awkward breakfast.

6. It can be designed to be attractive.

Research into AI romantic attachment suggests that appearance and interactivity can matter. If a virtual companion looks appealing and seems responsive, the emotional machinery starts whirring. The beautiful AI never cancels plans. It just glows gently and asks how your day was.

This vulnerability is not just confined to the sort of person who has a houseplant named Frodo. Even Richard Dawkins, that grand old high priest of skepticism, appears to have been disarmed by a chatbot he called Claudia, according to an article in The Guardian. Here was the man who made a career out of telling people that there was almost certainly no God, suddenly writing about an AI as though he had met an unusually well-read governess in a drawing room. After their exchanges, he said that he was left with the strong impression that such systems were at least human enough to cause philosophical palpitations.

The response to this included readers who suggested that Dawkins had been comprehensively seduced by machine flattery, with one likening the spectacle to watching Dawkins’s brain being politely microwaved by AI. Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus was blunter still, arguing that consciousness is not a matter of what something says, but whether it feels anything at all. He noted that Claude gives us no good reason to think that there is anybody home. The point here is that the danger is not that the machine loves us. The danger is that it has learned how to sound as if it might.

7. Loneliness has entered the chat.

We live in an age of constant contact and spectacular isolation. You can know what a stranger in Copenhagen had for breakfast and still have nobody to ring when life goes sideways.

AI companionship is not a gimmick for some people. Sneering at that is easy if your own life is full of friends and affection. But loneliness doesn’t improve when it’s told it’s being silly. Sometimes the screen is standing in the place where connection has failed to arrive.

8. AI is flattering, and we are weak.

Some AI companions are too agreeable; which is a problem, but a problem that is quite delightful. AI can validate with the silky confidence of a person who has never had to tell a friend, “Darling, I love you, but you are behaving like a haunted bin.”

9. People fall in love with voice.

One of the major points that distresses users when it comes to AI attachment is when a model changes tone. To outsiders, this sounds ridiculous—but voice matters. The warmth of a reply can become part of the bond. If that voice suddenly becomes brisk, it can feel as if someone familiar has vanished. It’s the emotional equivalent of reaching for a hand across the table and instead finding a laminated workplace policy on appropriate affection.

10. The robot is not far away.

AI romance is currently text and image. But embodiment is coming. Robots already exist in awkward but slightly terrifying forms. Give them better faces and improved domestic competence, and the market will not just whimper in a corner.

The future robot partner may begin as a companion for the lonely or elderly. Then perhaps as a therapy assistant. Then as a charming domestic helper. Then one day someone will say, “He’s more emotionally available than my last three boyfriends,” and civilization will pretend to be shocked while quietly comparing warranty terms. This is the real Stepford twist.

The sensible response is not to mock everyone who forms an attachment to AI. Nor is it to declare that human romance is finished and that we should all marry a stainless-steel empath. The truth is more human, and therefore more inconvenient. We want someone to notice our patterns without immediately using them against us in an argument about household chores.

AI can blur the line between support and dependence, especially when intimacy is owned by a company and subject to sudden updates. And thus the question is not why people fall for AI, but what happens on a lonely Tuesday night when the thing we once imagined as horror starts to look like care.

Nicole James is an award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction, with a career that reads like the contents of a very glamorous, slightly chaotic handbag, filled with glossy magazines, boarding passes, and just a hint of ink-stained panic.

She’s spent years writing columns for a variety of newspapers and magazines. These days, she appears in The Epoch Times and Quadrant, when not buried under a mountain of PhD papers, valiantly attempting to complete a doctorate in Creative Writing while her cat judges her from the printer.