Artificial Intimacy

Or an Assessment of Both Tsunami and Shelter

Given the difficult content of conversation in this post, I recommend it for mature and healed audiences only. Let us pray for a healing of culture and restoration of life lived gloriously in Christ.

The Incaluable Mystery of the Other

A rite of passage for each boy is learning how to talk to girls. In elementary school, the differences between boys and girls become more apparent: Differences in names, behavior, actions, maturity, play. Talking to girls becomes an art, a skill learned over time. Some guys are totally awkward about it, others overcompensate with bravado; both make mistakes and ideally learn how to navigate. While it’s a funny mystery upon reflection, it was a matter of life and death in the moment growing up. The courage to walk up to a pretty girl and say hi, passing a note to a girl’s friend to share with the one you fancied, the little giggles and mystery of what it all meant to “fall in love.” Funny now since I highly doubt the butterfly feelings of youth ever grasped the incalculable depths of true love. Love cannot be awakened before its time.

Reflecting on Adam and Eve in the garden, we recall the poetic moment when Adam sees Eve, sees an other “I,” and recognizes her beauty. “Behold, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” The echo of love between Adam and Eve is renewed each generation as relationships blossum into marriage and family life. These are not perfect relationships, but they aim to reflect the Trinitarian love of God for His Church, the Father’s love for each one of us, whether or not we know it.

Dance at Bougival (1883) by Renior

But in our present moment, the divide between those who know how to talk to girls and those who don’t is increasing. Effects of feminism, concerns over toxic masculinty, and the wild west of social media hasn’t done much for the relationships between guys and gals. Young eligible women are often left lonely and the young men don’t even bother to ask for a name. I know lots of young women who are looking for marriage, they are longing for children, but the single men around them won’t step up.

Despite this, I doubt that guys have lost interest in girls, they’ve simply lost the art. What should be passed down from father to son is instead learned on the internet by folks who are anything but authorities on the incaluable mystery of men and women. What has happened is an ever increasing reliance on media and unfortunately, pornography, which damages an understanding of each person’s dignity and provides unrealistic expectations of a healthy and natural human sexuality and relationships.

These challenges, I fear, will only increase as the plethora of internet content multiplies with each passing minute. Seemingly free, we have traded our valuable time and attention for the whims and pleasures of visual entertainment and industries that profit off our indepence. AI brings a new horizon for how pornography will impact not just our American culture, but global cultures as well.

AI’s Ease and the Quest for Easier Money

I have no doubt that most folks reading this have at least played with AI. From chatbots to art creation, a series of written prompts can generate just about anything. Sometimes, these can benefit and simplify work flows in one’s career. Othertimes, it simply gums up the process and creates more work on the backend to edit and correct artificially generated mistakes.

In my experience with AI, I’ve ebbed and flowed with seeing both the vices and virtues of this tool; and more often than not, it just gets in the way of clear thinking. While it will be interesting to see how things fully develop over the next few years, an abundance of money has been continuately pumped into the promise of AI to boost the economy and replace thought-workers. New datacenters (with nothing to be shared of their environmental, electrical, and water table impact) are being built ad noseum before really seeing the fruits of it’s impact.

While the massess worry about AI replacement or even superintelligent AGI (much to tune of Skynet from the Terminator series), it is interesting to note that the massess use AI in trivial ways. The tech companies have listened.

Apart from workflows for businesses, there is an abundance of AI usage that peaks during academic years and slims down during Christmas and Summer breaks. Further, many people are turning to AI chatbots for companionship for conversation; even it’s less about conversation and more about prompting a machine to tell you what you want to hear - like a really fancy Magic-8-Ball or Zoltar machine.

While white-collar folks worry about Artificial Intelligence, I wonder if we should instead be worried about Artificial Intimacy.

The tech companies recognize the hunger of young people for companionship. With this in mind, I wonder if the promises of AI are bit misguided. Sure, perhaps AI will provide real nifty tools for economic use, but the companies are building tools that seem to answer the problem of friendship in American society.

The Lesson of Lolita

There are many lessons worth thinking through for those who have dared to read Nabikov’s Lolita. One that comes to mind is the reality of the main character Humbert falling in love with the young Lolita and the way in which he “creates” her in his own image, teaching and guiding her while also letting her grow in limited ways. In a parallel to Dr. Frankenstein and his own creation, the dark obsession is hard to witness unfold. The horror of the gross situation in Lolita resonates with us as a Christian society because, even despite the rise of secularism, we still have strong Christian roots that recognize a proper place and context for human sexuality to be fully expressed. We see that the situation in Lolita is wrong, evil, diabolical. But sin exists and this situation sadly plays out in contemporary society. It’s most rampant form is through both written and visual pornography. A pornographic culture is a permissive culture unless we take a stand to protect the vulnerable and call both men and women to a higher standard.

The dramatic proliferation of pornography that has only increased with each decade. The newest iteration of this will be AI Erotica that the tech companies are currently developing and will sell at costs people will pay for. One only has to consider the enormous profits of the pornographic industry to the tune of $100 billion globally. If the illustrious promises of AI cannot be fulfilled, I wonder how much tech companies recognize that the money to be made in AI is in personalized pornography; this will be Rule 34 (Defintion: if it exists in the imagination, then someone has developed it into porngraphy) on steroids. In a market that’s already comfortable with generating AI text and images, generating written and visual pornography according to the wims and wounds of so many is on the horizon. We are on the cusp of a multiplication of content never before seen on such a large scale.

Joi and Officer K in Bladerunner 2049.

We have neglected the lesson of Lolita in seeing the dangers of tainted purity and I’m concerned. In the 1990s and prior, pornography had to be intentionally sought out, but for our own children in the 21st century, pornography will be intentionally seeking them out. While the companies will of course “limit” the use of these tools to consenting adults, teenagers will find ways around the digital fences; further yet, the content will be seeking them through deceptive means like catphishing.

The materialistci relativists in AI companies don’t see the degradation of the human person, or cultural damage, or harm in our children’s exposure. Worse yet, the countless topics and themes that AI Erotica will explore based on the sexual wounds of our society will awaken new perversions and expressions of it. The relationship between porn usage and sex offenders alone should be enough cause for concern, but those alarm bells will be silenced.

The tech companies creating AI Erotica tools see increased profit margins. They see an increase in monthly sales that justify the venture capitalist funding. The moral compass, already skewed, will continue spinning as more money is made. Justifications will be articulated that the images and words are technically fake, that no persons were harmed in the making of the videos or photos or stories, and even that the digital existence is better than degradation of real persons; but the digital world will impact reality itself. Men and women ought to speak with one other and temper each other through human experience, not digitally induced experiences that take place in darkened rooms under the glow of computer screens. Although AI girlfriends may say all the right things, they are not substitutes for the complex reality of human relationships between man and woman.

I suspect that while a useful tool, AI will soon pivot to this market of personal entertainment instead of more altruistic purposes. And even if AI is used altruistic ways, the majority of exposure and quantifiable use will be for self-entertainment in both it’s innocently banal and diabolical forms.

Communion as Antidote and Innoculation

Despite the overall tsunami of sin on the horizon (which is not new, only multiplied), our Christian faith calls us to not be afraid. While tempted to give into despair, one must hold out for hope of a brighter horizon. We must firmly reject sin and satan, renewing daily the call of our Christian baptism. The reality is pornography and the degradation of the human person has always existed since original sin. It’s many expressions, boring in and of themselves, are nothing new under the sun.

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already,
in the ages before us.
- Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

In an increasingly digital world, one such cure (among many) is to be found in the physical communion of friendship and joys of family life shared in community. Iron sharpens iron. Men hanging out with men cultivates better husbands and fathers. Women hanging out with women cultivates better wives and mothers.

I long to preserve the beautiful innocence of our children. I long for a culture in which we heed the wise words of St. John Paul II in his famous Theology of the Body; not because his teaching is simply about human sexuality, but rather because his teaching is about human persons and how we relate to one another. However, contemporary American society and the direction its going will inevitably lead to a broad exposure to vices with many faces and expressions. One way to properly innoculate ourselves and families from these sins to cultivate open lines of communication and love; a trust that our children can speak to us about what they encounter and see, and unpack a proper anthropology to discuss and diagnose reality as it is, and reality as God intends it.

In filling ourselves and our children with goodness and love, our children will hopefully have a proper disgust of sin and recognize its scent. We ought to firmly reject the cultural muck on offer and instead demand stories of true romance, of true heroism. These are the stories less known, but lived out quietly in lives of our fellow Christians. Get to know your neighbor’s story. Cultivating spaces to leisurely time together and in person creates occasions for time well spent. I’ll never forget the experiential definition of friendship I heard once on a retreat: “A friend is someone you waste time with.”

Healing is on the horizon.

The opportunity is therefore before us. If, despite the soon widespread availability of AI Erotica, people chose to not use that “tool,” then we will see it’s demise. This especially important in the formation of boys and young men who are inclined toward physical beauty, whereas girls and young ladies are more inclined toward emotional beauty. It is our responsibilty to cultivate, guide, and guard these dispositions to be healthy and expressed in their natural forms. We mothers and fathers ought to rise up to lead anew a proper expression of beautiful relationships that florish under God’s grace.

While Artificial Intimacy knocks at the door of our IP Addresses, true intimacy knocks at the door of our hearts. In Christ we shall be given the water will satiate our thirsts and properly orient us to be as created us to be; free and unafraid to truly love.