So, Like, Are Young Men Now Being Intimate With Bots?

I guess we were always gonna arrive here.

If you are someone who is into catastrophizing about the end of society as we know it (read: you’re sometimes on the Internet), you may have come across this “AI girlfriend” trend line. Basically, we’ve created more realistic, more human sex dolls with a ChatGPT plug-in and some guys are falling in love with them, and now it’s reached the general news cycle.

To backtrack a second, previously we had a moral panic about the general decline of men. All of us were masturbating in basements, screaming at our moms for more food, and playing first-person shooter games.

Then, a little bit later, some research came out that boys cannot talk to girls anymore and are becoming sexual herbivores and will never date.

The natural conclusion of this whole cycle was “a guy will stick his dick into a plastic doll that tells him how great he is.”

OK, so is this really happening?

I don’t know the actual numbers on adoption of these AI girlfriends, or downloads, or funding … but yes, it’s happening to some extent. I think most guys I’ve ever met would rather the real thing, and again the immense post-nut clarity of spooging over a plastic doll with a realistic human face is very intense to think about, but I could see this scale in terms of male loneliness. I don’t think every guy wants to have an anal experience with a doll, but I do think a lot of guys want someone to talk to. I could see this with married guys too, honestly.

In fact, a couple of years ago I worked with a woman, and she told me this story about a guy in a previous office of hers. He was married 15–20 years, somewhere in there, and him and his wife had long since devolved into only discussing their kids and kids’ activities. This guy’s best friend from growing up died of cancer, and he came home crying, saying “Harold died!” or whatever. The wife was like, “Henry needs to get to Little League” and left the kitchen. No reference to her husband’s dead best friend.

Months later, this guy ended up cheating. The wife found out, and they did stay together, but my co-worker wanted to know: was his cheating in some way justified? In short answer, no. Cheating is not justified by your wife ignoring you, although it’s a common reason men state. But — could I see this guy, in a parallel universe, download some bot named “Sabrina” and talk to her about his dead friend and eventually get a little sexual with her? Yes, I could see that.

It’s a very complicated dance around marriage and long-term relationships, because while most people try to deify them (look at Valentine’s Day social media posts), the reality is they’re very hard and most people do “quiet-quit” them eventually.

So could an AI girlfriend come into marriages? Sure, I could see that. Probably not many marriages, but some. I also think most guys that would cheat would prefer to cheat with something real. This is an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people, but a lot of guys do love some cock worship, and when you’ve been with someone 12–15 years and you hate them for never unloading the dishwasher properly, some women are through with cock worship. As a result, men stray. It’s not morally justified, but it’s true. I had some similar experiences and emotions with this after I got divorced in 2017.

We are at some kind of crossroads around:

• How men are and how men are being raised

• What women expect

• Generally how awful dating is via apps

• Declining interest in marriage

• Consistently-OK to high divorce rate

• Fertility rates

Do AI girlfriends help this moment? No. They might appease some measure of loneliness, but they’re not solving anything for us right now, no. Is it quite the moral panic of the moment? It’s a funny thing to discuss, I guess — “Look at these losers and their downloads” — but I doubt it’s happening enough to really think it’s the end of women, the end of marriage, etc. But it’s a troubling intersection and we should keep a half-eye on it.

What’s your take?