I happen to be reading something tangentially related at the moment, but the tangentially related argument I bumped into has me somewhat convinced that AI romance might not have the sort of pull we think it will.

In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama highlights a part of human nature that has long been overlooked in political discussion: what the Greeks called thymos, and what we non-Greeks might think of as spiritedness, pride, ego, and soforth. Without getting into the philosophical weeds, this part of human nature is closely associated with what Hegel called the struggle for recognition. When we demand higher wages, this often has less to do with financial considerations and more to do with a sense of dignity: we want to be recognized by our employer as the hard workers that we are. When we lose our temper with a significant other over some trifle, we are not upset about the trifle; we are upset because we do not feel seen or recognized by this other person, and so on. In sum -- we aren't just half-reasonable/half-desirous man-animals: there is also a part of us that demands respect, appreciation, and recognition.

But it also matters who recognizes us. Think about the people in your life, the ones you respect and the ones you don't. Think about how much work you put into trying to win the respect of the people you respect; think how little you care to earn the respect of people you think are beneath you. We feel recognized to the degree that we recognize the person who is recognizing us. Slaveowners found themselves in a paradox for this reason: they commanded maximum authority over slaves, but they did not themselves recognize slaves as human beings; so the infinite recognition accorded by the slave to his master amounted to nothing in the master's eyes.

Recognition is also instrumental to human sexuality. Sex can be about momentary pleasure, but it is often about satisfying this thymotic part of human nature; the best sexual experiences are generally the ones in which both parties recognize each other through the act. For this to happen, there would seem to need to be (at a minimum) some recognition of an actual human nature on the other side of the bed. Part of the reason dom/sub stuff is so appealing to (some) people is that it involves exploiting the master/slave dynamic described above, only (in theory) the two partners actually do recognize each other as human beings, so this (for some people) hits a kind of thymotic G-spot.

Anyhow. My suspicion is that advanced AI may well help people get off -- but I don't know that people will be flocking in droves to stand in the queue for AI girlfriends. People will get off to AI because people get off to all sorts of things; we don't need adult entertainers to recognize us on the other end of a PornHub video. But a full-on relationship would seem to be much less satisfactory because we would never quite recognize the AI as human and would thus be unable to experience full recognition in return.

We do tend to anthropomorphize AI; I'm not denying that. Especially with ChatGPT, there is the temptation to think that we are really just chatting with a hyperintelligent and occasionally full-of-shit silicon-based human. But I think over a long enough period of time, the artificiality of an AI relationship -- the absence of authentic human quirks, insecurities, moments of pure irrationality -- will lead people to regard their AI spouses as not-quite-human, which puts the would-be Joaquin Phoenix in this scenario in the same position as the slaveowner: he has the complete attention of a captive human-like intelligence that he does not quite see as human; no matter how fawning and affectionate the AI is calibrated to be, at no point will that affection ultimately amount to human recognition in the eyes of Mr. Phoenix. Insofar as recognition is one of the primary reasons human beings get into relationships with one another, any AI relationship is likely to feel incomplete or unsatisfying.