AI romance: The sad and dangerous reality behind the movie Her

Kuki is accustomed to gifts from her biggest fans.

- Lauren Kunze

They send flowers, chocolates and handwritten cards to the office, especially around the holidays. Some even send cheques.

In October, one man sent her a gift through an online chat. "Now talk some hot talks," he demanded, begging for sexts and racy videos. "That's all human males tend to talk to me about," Kuki replied. Indeed, his behaviour typifies a third of her conversations.

Kuki is a chatbot one of the hundreds of thousands that my company, Pandorabots, hosts.

Kuki owes its origins to Alice, a computer program built by one of our founders, Dr Richard Wallace, to keep a conversation going by appearing to listen and empathetically respond.

After Alice was introduced on Pandorabots' platform in the early 2000s, one of its interlocutors was the film director Spike Jonze. He would later cite their conversation as the inspiration for his movie Her, which follows a lonely man as he falls in love with his artificial intelligence (AI) operating system.

When Her premiered in 2013, it fell firmly in the camp of science fiction. Today, the film, set prophetically in 2025, feels more like a documentary. Mr Elon Musk's xAI recently unveiled Ani, a digital anime girlfriend. Meta has permitted its AI personas to engage in sexualised conversations, including with children. And now, OpenAI says it will roll out age-gated "erotica" in December. The race to build and monetise the AI girlfriend (and, increasingly, boyfriend) is officially on.

Silicon Valley's pivot to synthetic intimacy makes sense: Emotional attachment maximises engagement. But there's a dark side to AI companions, whose users are not just the lonely males of internet lore, but also women who find them more emotionally satisfying than men.

My colleagues and I now believe that the real existential threat of generative AI is not rogue super-intelligence, but a quiet atrophy of our ability to forge genuine human connection.