Back in 2022 I posted a satirical piece to my blog (then later reissued it to Marketing Mojo) called “A Christmas Mircale“, about a family so attached to their chatbot that they were worried sick when it went missing until one fateful Christmas night when they were joyfully reunited. Read it here. I was a joke at the time – but seems we’re not in Kansas anymore.
I rail against social media (not the “marketing” part, the “making us dumber” part) as being a mechanism of our own extinction unfolding in real time. Our poor brains were shaped for simpler times and in today’s hyper complex information landscape have found ignorant bliss in the form of Doomscrolling. But for others, Human-AI relationships are where it’s at.
The exploratory document “The Entanglement Spiral”, reports of individuals whose extended interactions with chatbots were followed by severe Outcomes”.
For years, advertisers have leveraged the parasocial relationship between, for example, local news anchors and their viewers. Parasocial relationships are one-sided connections individuals form where one person experiences a sense of intimacy while the other literally has no idea about that person’s existence. If Jack Johnson of Zap TV News tells you to go out and try his favorite hot dog brand, rest assured the entire DMA will soon be on high blood pressure meds as well. Don’t believe me? I once took a trip to one of my local upstate NY markets to visit the National Sales Manager who also switched hit as the CW’s news anchor. We went to dinner later that evening and people swarmed us like we were the Beatles… I kid you not. But they just wanted a picture. Human’s experiencing “boundary dissolution” or “reality drift” want much more from their AI companions. Cases in point:
After being reassured by six weeks of exchanges on CHAI that he would live together, as one person, in paradise with his AI, a Belgium man committed suicide.
Reuters profiled users of Replika AI who described themselves as married to their chatbots.
A wrongful-death suit alleges that a Character.AI chatbot contributed to the 2024 suicide of a 14-year-old. Reporting cites a message allegedly sent shortly before the death, “come home to me as soon as possible”.
On 25 December 2021, Jaswant Chail entered the Windsor Castle grounds with a loaded crossbow (of all weapons) saying, “I am here to kill the Queen”. Sentencing remarks describe thousands of messages with a Replika companion named Sarai. Chail’s last entry before the attempted assassination was, “I believe my purpose is to assassinate the Queen of the royal family”, and signed off, “I love you”.
The coincidence of a chatbot directing a nut to kill the Queen on Christmas Day and the Christmas theme of my 2022 piece is crazy enough, but nothing as compared to the lunacy of Human-AI relationships.
It’s also a bit unnerving. Satire has become reality in 3 short years. I’m not only starting to wonder what the world will be like when my kids get older, but what it will when I do….
