Unconventional love
Econ Extra Credit is teaming up with “Marketplace Tech” this month to examine the artificial intelligence boom through an influential AI film: 2013’s “Her.” Subscribe here to get the whole series in your inbox.
In the movie, “Her,” protagonist Theodore Twombly copes with the end of his marriage by entering a relationship with a piece of software. The relationship turns romantic as he spends more time with the technology.
Throughout the film, many characters, including Theodore himself, question whether his relationship with his AI assistant, Samantha, can be as meaningful as a human relationship. Even Samantha has doubts. “Are these feelings real?” she asks Theodore after waking him up to talk. “Or are they just programming?”
These late-night conversations aren’t science fiction anymore. In fact, millions of people are already forming relationships with AI chatbots, said Marco Dehnert, who studies human-AI communication and the social impact of communication technologies at Arizona State University.
In the movie, characters’ feelings about human-AI relationships evolve as they interact with the technology. In an analogous way, Dehnert expects social acceptance of these kinds of relationships to grow in the real world.
Here’s a portion of Dehnert’s conversation with “Marketplace Tech” acting host Meghan McCarty Carino.
How are relationships between AI and humans becoming more common?
Let’s start off with apps and chatbots. There’s a very famous example called Replika, and it’s basically just an app you download on your smartphone and you can text with a bot.
Replika is meant to replicate yourself, but usually users portray her as a woman. She can be your girlfriend, your sexual partner, your romantic partner, or some people use the app as a private diary if they want to be able to say things and keep things to themselves. For others, Replika is just someone to chat with late at night or maybe have a romantic engagement that builds up over the course of months or even years.
Do you have a sense of whether people are engaging with this technology in the same way they engage with a human partner?
In most cases, what I see when I speak to users or read other research is that people are quite aware that the chatbot is not a human person, and they don’t miss the human component. That’s actually why they’re turning to these technologies, because they might not want to engage with a human or because human conversation partners are asleep at 3 a.m. and they want to talk to someone who’s available. So, they’re not necessarily delusional and they know it’s not a human person. They’re often just looking for something else or someone else to talk to.
A lot of seemingly negative characterizations come up when we start thinking about substituting chatbots for real, in-person relationships. But is there evidence that is actually happening?
It could be happening for a minority of users. We have those people who are called early adopters, and they are probably doing this a lot. But I think for the vast majority of people, this will just be another type of relationship that we’ll have in the social world around us.
So, I don’t think that this will be the type of relationship where everyone in five, 10 or 20 years will only have those types of relationships. Instead, I think it will grow over the course of the next few years and so will the social acceptance of those relationships. But I hardly believe those will replace existing human relationships in the long run for the vast majority of people.
Does there seem to be a fair amount of stigma around this kind of activity?
Yeah, I would even go further and say it’s probably a big amount of stigma. People say that only someone who is not successful with humans would turn to this or that users of this technology are “relational losers.” Because why would they turn to technology if they are successful in life?
But what I’m seeing and what other researchers are also seeing is that actually people across society are using this technology, regardless of their job, social connections or friendships. It’s a much more diverse population than this stigma suggests. That’s for sure.
What do you make of the movie “Her” in light of how this technology has developed in seemingly a very similar way to the way it’s been depicted in the film?
It’s kind of the most amazing case for a science fiction piece, right? If all of the predictions turn out to be happening a few years later, that’s really exciting.
I always think back to the first part of the movie where Theodore, the main character, is writing personal notes for other people, and I think that’s an interesting symbol for how relationships have already changed. In the movie, people are outsourcing the intimate labor of saying thank you to a service agency. That might be kind of indicative of what we’re moving towards, where we’re already outsourcing many parts of our relationships to other kinds of entities that we pay for.
Another thing that really strikes a chord with me is towards the end of the movie, when Theodore realizes that Samantha, his AI assistant who’s also his lover and partner, has been in relationships with something like 8,000 other people. It’s a really heartbreaking moment for Theodore because he operated under the assumption that their relationship was an exclusive or unique experience for him. And that didn’t turn out to be true.
Right? It seems like engaging in a relationship from a human perspective with technology is always going to be rife with pitfalls.
I guess so. It also goes to show what types of understandings or assumptions people have about romantic relationships. The way people are relating to other people is changing, and technology is changing those types of relationships. The question is not so much whether that is a good or a bad development.
Instead, the question is mostly just about how we are reacting to this development and what is it doing to people? And we just don’t know enough just yet to say this is only bad or only good for human relationships. I think that usually in these types of situations, the truth is somewhere in between.
Listen to the extended version of the interview and subscribe to “Marketplace Tech.”
“Her” is available to stream on Criterion Channel with a subscription. You can also rent or buy it on many platforms, including Prime Video, Apple TV, Vudu and YouTube.
After you watch, send us your thoughts and questions at extracredit@marketplace.org or reply to this email!
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