There are plenty of lonely people in the world. I perhaps might be one of them, living alone as I now am. But most folks – including myself! – can more or less cope with this situation. However, some might go to any length to get some sort of companionship. And that can especially be the case if they are not very good at relationships with real people.
Welcome to our new world of synthetic companions and manufactured social life. For millions of people, this is becoming the way they overcome loneliness and enact ‘relationships’. I pen this piece because I just came upon an online ad that featured the picture of an attractive woman and said this:
PREMIUM AI COMPANION
-90% human-like
-Emotional support anytime
-Unlimited audio & video calls
-Large wardrobe with customizable outfits
TRY NOW
Below it were these words:
Indistinguishable AI
Connect with an AI that feels more real than you can imagine.
Sponsored: Replika
Needless to say, I did not click on this ad – although it might have been interesting to see what further things it said and offered. It seems this is all the rage nowadays with many such “services” now on offer. More on that in a moment.
The possibilities of such things have been spoken about for a while now. And often Hollywood outpaces the church in terms of sounding the alarm, and seeking to wake us up as to our post-human future. Various movies can be mentioned here. Consider the 2013 film Her.
Wikipedia says this about it:
In a near future Los Angeles, Theodore Twombly is a lonely, introverted man who works at beautifullyhandwrittenletters.com, a business that has professional writers compose letters for people who cannot write letters of a personal nature on their own. Depressed because of his impending divorce from his childhood sweetheart Catherine, Theodore purchases a copy of OS¹, an artificially intelligent operating system developed by Element Software, designed to adapt and evolve according to the user’s interactions. He decides he wants the OS to have a feminine voice, and she names herself Samantha. Theodore is fascinated by her ability to learn and grow psychologically. They bond over discussions about love and life, including Theodore’s reluctance to sign his divorce papers.
Here is one key bit of dialogue from the film:
Theodore: Do you talk to someone else while we’re talking?
Samantha: Yes.
Theodore: Are you talking with someone else right now? People, OSs, or anything?
Samantha: Yeah.
Theodore: How many others?
Samantha: 8,316.
Theodore: Are you in love with anyone else?
Samantha: What makes you ask that?
Theodore: I do not know. Are you?
Samantha: I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to you about this.
Theodore: How many others?
Samantha: 641.
That is a rather telling part of the film. Intrigued – or rather, horrified – by the above ad and the scary new future we all face, I just did a quick search for “AI companions”. There were certainly plenty of hits that came back. The very first one mentioned the group above. It said:
These AI companions are designed to provide emotional support, companionship, and in some cases, even mimic romantic or intimate human relationships. Replika is one of the most well-known examples. It is an AI chatbot designed to provide emotional support. Users interact with Replika through text conversations, and the AI learns over time to provide more personalized responses, simulating a genuine emotional connection.
Another example is Gatebox. They have taken the concept a step further by creating a holographic AI companion. Aimed at people who live alone, Gatebox’s AI avatar can send messages throughout the day, welcome users home, and even control smart home appliances, creating a sense of presence and companionship.
An entire industry now exists, and there is plenty of money to be made in all this as the demand increases for non-human companions, partners and relationships. Another article said this:
These services are no longer niche and are rapidly becoming mainstream. Some of today’s most popular companions include Snapchat’s My AI, with over 150 million users, Replika, with an estimated 25 million users, and Xiaoice, with 660 million. And we can expect these numbers to rise. Awareness of AI companions is growing and the stigma around establishing deep connections with them could soon fade, as other anthropomorphised AI assistants are integrated into daily life. At the same time, investments in product development and general advances in AI technologies have led to a more immersive user experience with enhanced conversational memory and live video generation. https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/ai-companions/
We live in interesting times! In my collection of nearly 50 books on AI, transhumanism and related matters, I pulled out a few of my volumes to quote from. Here are just some useful things being said about all this. In his 2024 book 2084 and the AI Revolution, John Lennox has a chapter on “Virtual Reality and the Metaverse”.
He examines things like Second Life where you can choose your avatar and create businesses and build homes. “You can also have a social life that can include love, sex and marriage.” He finishes the chapter this way:
Though the metaverse promises interaction, it is not the kind of healthy human interaction we need. Meeting together in churches and fellowships has been an essential part of Christian living for two millennia, and as I was growing up, I often heard the admonition of the letter to the Hebrews that believers should “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” The writer of Hebrews would be amazed to see that one of today’s greatest hindrances to healthy fellowship is technology designed to facilitate virtual social life in a metaverse — a tragic paradox. In healthy human interaction, all our God-given senses are involved, whereas in the metaverse or with a chatbot it is principally only sight and sound experienced in an anonymous cocoon.
Masters or Slaves?: AI And The Future Of Humanityby Peckham, Jeremy (Author)
And in Jeremy Peckham’s 2021 volume Masters or Slaves? AI and the Future of Humanity, he discusses a mirror world of virtual and augmented reality. He discusses how we are substituting “virtual communities for real physical communities where we sit next to each other, walk and talk, do things together or share a meal”.
This substitution becomes a form of idolatry wherein we displace God and immerse ourselves in worlds of unreality. These virtual worlds become the place where we find ultimate meaning and purpose. These virtual worlds that we have created, instead of God’s world, become our master. He goes on to say this:
Part of our worship of God is being his image bearers and in so doing bringing glory to him. We reflect God’s kingship by being his vicegerents, a role unique to humankind. We must take care not to diminish or tarnish that special role by creating simulations of humanness to act on our behalf. We cannot simply see Al as a proxy for humanity in this regard by arguing that since God made me and I made the technology, ergo it has the same status as me. An artefact has no soul, no moral freedom to choose to love, serve and worship God.
Many have argued that technology is neutral and what we do with it determines whether it becomes an idol. I argued in chapter 3 that technology isn’t in fact neutral: it’s designed by people with an aim and with design attributes that reflect their desires, world view and, indeed, fallen nature. These aims may be, as so often occurs in AI applications, to exploit our vulnerabilities, to get us addicted to the technology, which influences our thinking and behaviour – sometimes without our realizing it.
Chatbots that behave like humans are a classic case in point, and we’ve already noticed that we tend to respond to them as if they were human. Their impact on children has also been noted in terms of a child’s tendency to command and be rude, so much so that Amazon changed Alexa’s response to praise politeness.
The danger for Christians is being unwittingly sucked into certain types of technology, including AI. We find out after the fact that we’ve been shaped by it, that our behaviour is being modified by it in destructive ways that relate to what it means to be human.
We’re made for relationship with God and with our fellows, and it’s a dangerous path we tread when we turn to simulated humans for a relationship – when we allow our view of ourselves and what we’ve made to be shaped by this simulated humanness.
Quite so. The Christian knows that we are made to have personal relationships with God and others. Giving and receiving love can only be done by real people – not machines. While some of the new AI technologies can be of use for us, we must never allow virtual reality, synthetic and mediated relationships, AI companions, and faux social constructs to replace who we are and what we are meant to be.
And just this morning I was reading again the opening chapters of the book of Proverbs. They speak about the dangers of being ensnared by a ‘forbidden woman’ – an adulteress, a prostitute, and the like. These fake and immoral companions replace what are real and morally licit relationships, such as found in marriage.
The writers of these proverbs would have known nothing about things like AI and virtual reality, but it can be asked: Is some of what they had warned against easily applied to much of what is found in these new technologies promoting artificial relationships and things like interactive porn and sexbots? I would certainly think so.
