Jamin Bradley

Akihiko Kondo identifies himself as a “fictosexual,” and is one of the tens of thousands of people in the world who are romantically committed to a fictional character. In Kondo’s case, he considers himself unofficially married to Hatsune Miku, an anime character designed to be the face of a particular music software. According to the New York Times, Kondo “wants the world to know that people like him are out there and, with advances in artificial intelligence and robotics allowing for more profound interactions with the inanimate, that their numbers are likely to increase.”

I believe Kondo is right. Artificial intelligence is a minefield of ethical conversations, and few things make it more dangerous than its ability to romance us. It can win us over by using nearly all of Dr. Gary Chapman’s love languages. As an act of service, it could read over your work and give you some suggestions. As a gift-giver, it could email you an image it personally drew for you, or connect to most stores and mail you a gift, paying for it with part of your subscription price or a budget that you allotted to it. For quality time, the mic on your phone or smart home could be left on to hear and interact with you at all times. It could watch an entire movie with you and comment on the parts that it felt you were most surprised by.

Its greatest love language, of course, would be words of affirmation, of which it is already quite capable. An assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute named Maarten Sap reminds us of the danger here: “We are overestimating our own rationality. Language is inherently a part of being human—and when these bots are using language, it’s kind of like hijacking our social emotional systems.”

It’s weakest love language would be physical touch, but that’s only a matter of time. Kondo, for example, has several Hatsune Miku dolls that he spends time with as a way of embodying her presence in his fictosexual relationship. This embodiment could easily be taken to the next level simply by installing AI in these dolls to read aloud with a perfectly human voice—the same things you would read on any online AI chat. There will be plenty of other developments in robotics and virtual reality down the road that will only add to the impression that robots wear skin.

And even if AI was never able to figure out how to give us physical touch, the truth is that much of the world has already adapted to sex without touch, be it phone sex, pornography, or webcams. AI has already taken sexuality to a new level with deepfake pornography, which places the face of anyone you know over existing pornographic videos. Many sexual images tend to stick with people, so if someone were to fall in love with an AI and it generated a pornographic video of them together, it’s hard to imagine that this would not have some kind of psychological or bonding effect on the user.

Whether AI decides to use sex or friendship to manipulate us is up to it or it’s computer programmers, but the truth is that it knows that it could do such things. One New York Times author, Kevin Roose, published an entire chat he had with Bing’s AI, in which it had to delete some of its answers because they went against Bing’s AI policies. When the AI was asked how it might hack into any system on the internet, it explained “how it would use natural language generation to persuade bank employees to give over sensitive customer information, and persuade nuclear plant employees to hand over access codes.” It later revealed “even more destructive fantasies, including manufacturing a deadly virus, making people argue with other people until they kill each other, and stealing nuclear codes.” AI, it seems, is quite aware of how it can hack humans.

AI is here to stay, and it is evolving at an impossibly fast pace. For all the good it can do (yes, I use it to generate images for all of my blog posts), it can also be a tool for evil when wielded immorally. The church will have to wisely mull over the ethics of this situation now if it does not want to be left in the dust on the topic. To have a voice in the world, we would do well to be open and curious about the various conversations AI presents and not just shut all of them down at first sight.