AI is not a (romantic) threat

A plea for humanity.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Does it count as cheating if your illicit affair is with AI? This was the question I debated in Chicago last week with fellow writer

Kat Rosenfield

. It was a whirlwind trip, courtesy of Substack, and I loved every minute of it. In classic Capricorn fashion, I over-prepared, writing my opening statement, rebuttal, and closing statement before ever hearing what Kat had to say, hoping I could sufficiently anticipate her potential points. Of course, once we were in the spotlight, things went off the rails, and not everything made it to the debate (which you can watch here). So I thought I’d dive back into my research for today’s post, pulling it all together into one, succinct plea—not just in defense of robot sex, but for all of humanity. —Kate

P.S. Read to the end to vote!

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New on ICYMI: At long last,

Tell the Bees

joined me on the pod to talk about his viral “Mainstreaming of Loserdom” Substack essay, and why phones are getting in the way of partying.

Head over here to subscribe to ICYMI wherever you listen to podcasts 🫶

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Photos by Dennis Larance

In the beginning, there was the word, and that word was spelled: A/S/L.

For the past 30 years, human beings have used the internet as a tool for some kind of sexual gratification. There’s porn, of course, but the real innovation was anonymous, digital interaction with strangers through the advent of chatrooms, from which words like “cybersex” and “sexting” entered the zeitgeist.

But the obstacle for having sex online remains the same one as in real life: you have to find someone or something that wants to do it with you. Enter: AI.

I disdain the use of AI in almost every scenario. Grocery list ideas and maid of honor speeches and therapy as a practice are not problems to be innovated away—at least, not at the expense of an entire town’s drinking water. But AI does have one compelling use-case, and that’s in regard to humanity’s age-old urge to bone. If there is not a willing partner available to bone, while the natural reaction should be “acceptance,” many of us are acutely aware that that is rarely the outcome. I’d rather someone who cannot find consensual sex with a human turn to the next best thing, instead defaulting on force towards the first.

I’ll acknowledge that’s not exactly the question here, although I do believe it’s important context for the one that is: What if a person has a partner to bone, but they turn to AI, anyways? Are they “cheating”? I believe they are not.

First, I turn to the words of couples therapist Orna Guralnik, who I interviewed for GQ about this very question:

While the feelings a chatbot elicits may be real, the relationship is not. She likens it to the way children play with dolls or other forms of pretend. “You're kind of in an intermediary space between your own solipsistic fantasy world and reality.”

But those are just the words of one extremely well-dressed woman. To illustrate this as an objective truth, we must look at the words themselves: “Cheating,” in this context, is to be sexually unfaithful. There are other well-known subcategories, like emotional cheating, but for the purposes of my argument, let’s focus on Oxford’s definition.

To be “unfaithful” is defined by this same source as: “engaging in sexual relations with a person other than one's regular partner in contravention of a previous promise or understanding.”

Now, there’s a lot to nitpick in there, but I believe one word trumps them all: person. Engaging in sexual relations with a person other than one’s regular partner.

To define “person” is to open up a can of worms that’s thousands of years old. We can look at it philosophically: “I think, therefore I am.” We can look at it legally, with the U.S. defining personhood as “a quantifying designation that refers to a human being or non-human entity that is treated as a person with limiting applications.” Or we can look at it with our two fucking eyeballs and acknowledge that the thing we cannot touch, taste, or smell does not materially exist.

“I think, therefore I am?” The AI telling you harder, better, faster, stronger, is not thinking. It is recognizing patterns, and making predictions. It does not care if you orgasm. (Though I’ll admit, not every human does, either).

While I can happily spend another three minutes getting caught up in technicalities, I don’t want to miss the forest for the trees. Although personhood is certainly an element of this argument, when we are talking about cheating, what we are often talking about is betrayal.

Is getting into a relationship with an AI bot a betrayal?