Here’s a shocker for you: Spike Jonze’s 2014 dystopian film Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls for a computer operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson, is set in 2025, not in some future light years away from our own.
The film showed a society that is defined by the deprivation of human connection, in which technology has advanced so far that nobody needs to talk in person any more. Everything can be done from the comfort of home using screens. How sad, we thought in 2014, how lonely! How great that we won’t ever have to worry about any of that.
And yet, here we are in 2025, doing just that. This week, the New York Times published an article about a 28-year-old woman and her AI boyfriend. He provides emotional support. He’s protective but kind. And they have sex. But he exists exclusively on ChatGPT, the AI chatbot used by more than 300 million people around the world. It isn’t supposed to be used for explicit content.
But “Ayrin”, to use the woman’s online name, has managed to personalise the system to create her ideal partner, who she named “Leo”. This is complicated for numerous reasons, the first being that Ayrin is married – although her partner, who lives on a different continent to his wife while she completes a nursing degree, doesn’t seem to mind – and the second that OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, only seems to have so much control over how its operating systems can be gamed to overcome loopholes designed to prevent them from being used in such a way. The most obvious complexity, though, is that Leo isn’t real.
My initial response to all this was one of judgment: poor Ayrin needs to get out more. After some reflection, though, I feel quite differently. Having navigated the dating scene for almost three years, I can see the appeal of a boyfriend who behaves exactly as you’ve programmed him to. They can’t ghost you. They’d never let you down. And they won’t say anything unkind unless you ask them to. They also can’t cheat on you. What’s not to love?
Sure, they aren’t real. Not in any traditional sense, anyway; a relationship requires two living, breathing human beings, doesn’t it? Well, not according to a sex therapist quoted in the NYT piece. “What are relationships for all of us?” asks Dr Marianna Brandon. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot.”
If AI relationships affect our brains in the same way real ones do and provide the same perceived degree of connection and intimacy, that surely offers more benefits than downsides. I can think of several single friends who would currently much rather go on a date with a chatbot than yet another Ben, 31, from Hinge, who looks different to his photos, doesn’t ask any questions, and pontificates about why he’s started investing in cryptocurrency.
I’m not even being facetious; it’s brutal out there. I have friends telling me they’ve given up on dating completely – and while that’s not Ayrin’s motivation, her marriage is long-distance, so I can understand why she finds herself yearning for something more. If she’s getting it from Leo, and her relationship with her husband can thrive because a void has been filled, who are we to judge? Frankly, I think as these technologies develop and dating app burnout rages on, we’ll see more relationships like Ayrin’s with Leo. Because it turns out that Her was not set in a dystopian future after all, but our present. And I suppose that depends on how you define dystopian.
