Dating alone

As digital technologies invade every dimension of modern experience, fewer young people seem willing to pursue romantic relationships through the gauntlet of modern dating. Another contributing factor can now be added to the list: artificial intelligence.

People can now commit themselves to a smorgasbord of AI programs if they want to act out a slew of ongoing text-based flings. This trend doesn’t just apply to burned-out singles. One 28-year-old woman became emotionally attached to the unconditional affirmation she received from her curated companion generated by OpenAI and spent large amounts of money to sustain it despite the fact she was already married to someone in real life. Replika, an AI companion app that reports it has millions of users globally, also counts married people among its customers.

Some people can see AI dating and sexual relating as morally acceptable (even preferable) only because modern sexuality has been divorced from a traditional understanding of human nature. As Christian ethicist Oliver O’Donovan argues: “The more we detach erotic relationship from its natural ends, the more the element of play predominates, and with it the exploration of ingenuity and device within the erotic realm. It is not an accident, in other words, that a society which has sought to free erotic relationships from their procreative end, has also developed erotic fantasy and technique to a high level of sophistication.” When romantic relationships are reduced to mere outlets for personal pleasure-seeking, it’s not hard to see why someone might find a chatbot a better option than dealing with another emotional being with needs, demands, and expectations. We’re not just bowling alone anymore. Apparently, we’re dating alone, too.

The particular insidiousness of AI dating is that it gives a false impression of genuine connection with none of the give-and-take that so transforms us when seeking to love another person. Pursuing authentic, embodied dating relationships requires accepting the risk of being known, opening ourselves up to the possibility of intimacy in the hopes of sincere reciprocation. C. S. Lewis’ apt words from The Four Loves continue to ring true: “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”

Amid a culture that constantly glorifies self-love, the biblical call is to cherish a divinely designed but imperfect fellow image-bearer in marriage as a lifelong commitment. But that kind of commitment is now seen as a hindrance, not a help, to personal happiness. AI dating is merely one symptom of how smartphones rewrite our experience through mediating all of reality as pixelated panopticons. The digitized delusion of freedom through total autonomy, including how we seek to receive affirmation and love by computerized means, is ultimately an enslavement to ego. Timothy Leary might have told a once mighty tide of hippies to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” in the 1960s, but chatbot trysts are hardly what he had in mind.

If we want to revive and renew our commitment to relationships, we will have to resist the self-seclusion from the world AI thrives upon. Individuals have to be reminded of their essential humanity as demanding ties that bind for no other reason that we’re innately worth enough to make them because God willed that it be so. No AI program can mirror the capacity of a human being to love another human being. Those who have been unconditionally loved by the Sovereign Lord who made them out of the desires of His own heart are tasked with doing the same for everyone around them.

Only in realizing we were intended for interdependence by our Creator can we see our need to love and be loved by others. By showcasing how God intended us to live side-by-side, affections can be reawakened to what love and acceptance are supposed to look like when they are freely given for their own sake. Who knows what we might discover about ourselves when we are not merely driven by our own artificial echoes.