This post is just one of many submitted for the February 2024 IndieWeb Carnival. You should read the rest, too.
I’m going to level with you. I’ve held off on writing a post for the February 2024 IndieWeb Carnival hosted by Manuel Moreale because I wasn’t sure what I should write about, let alone what I /wanted/ to write about. Writing about relationships with AIs seemed a natural topic, given that many characters in my fiction are AI daemons or some kind of androids.
However, I am not particularly interested in writing about people investing chatbots with human qualities they not actually possess and then engaging in parasocial relationships with them. I’m certainly not interested in writing about people having cybersex with their chatbots. Nor am I intrigued by the notion of having sex with an AI-equipped RealDoll. I’ve seen that movie before; it’s called /Ex Machina/ and it didn’t end well for any of the men involved -- though the movie showed they plainly had it coming. Misogynistic techbros usually do. Besides, I’ve never been that lonely.
Were it still fashionable to name personality defects after figures from Greek mythology, we might call this the “Pygmalion Complex” after the sculptor whose love for a statue he created was such that Aphrodite brought it to life. You can find the tale recounted in a translation of Ovid’s /Metamorphoses/ if you care. However, Ovid doesn’t tell us how Galatea (the statue) felt about being brought to life to serve as a fuckdoll for some sculptor who couldn’t relate to the human women around him. Perhaps that is the theme Madeline Miller tackles in her short story “Galatea”, but I haven’t read it yet. Also, it might be too easy to confuse the “Pygmalion Complex” with the Pygmalion effect, which involves expectations affecting performance.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but think of Akihiko Kondo, whose ardor for the virtual and perpetually-adolescent singer Hatsune Miku was such that he married a hologram of her in 2019. The hologram died in 2022, when its creator Gatebox discontinued support for it. No doubt Kondo was devastated. I have trouble sympathizing because of the way I was socialized and the nature of his relationship, but it’s not my business to invalidate his feelings. So, what will people in love with chatbots like Replika do when these chatbots are no longer supported? Is their love less real than mine is for my wife Catherine?
That relationship started digitally back in 2000. We met on a Yahoo! forum for wannabe writers. I had found something she had written about the nature of imagination intriguing and reached out to her. We ended up emailing and chatting privately. It was about six months before I realized that I was at least infatuated with her.
I knew it wasn’t “real”. I had never met her in person. I had never spoken to her face-to-face. I had never held her hand. I had never eaten with her. I had never gazed into her eyes. Nevertheless, I wanted to.
Meeting “in real life” somebody you met online wasn’t common or encouraged a quarter century ago. After all, the other person might not be who they claimed to be. They might be less attractive. They might not be the age, race, sex, or gender they claimed to be. They might even be a serial killer.
At least, that’s what Catherine’s family and friends told her. That’s what the corporate-owned entertainment and news media in the US told me, too.
Nevertheless, because we had communicated so much before finally meeting in 2002, the attraction was there when we finally met in person. I had gone to meet her, to allay her family’s concerns and those of her friends. She had pounced on me at the airport, stolen three quick kisses, and that was all it took for me. We only had a few days together, but when it was time for me to return home I refused to look back not because I wanted to put Catherine firmly behind me, but because I was afraid that if I looked back I'd try to stay when it just wasn’t a realistic option.
A few months later, I asked her to marry me. We worked together to get a visa for her, and we got married on Halloween 2004. We're still married almost 20 years later. I have no regrets. She claims the same, and 99.999% of the time I believe her.
We talked about /everything/ before we got married, at great length, over email and instant messaging and phone calls that often ended with one of us listening to the other sleep because they could no longer stay awake. We still talk about all sorts of things. For example, I mentioned this article, and how I’m comparing people seeing human qualities in the chatbots they use with Pygmalion. I think the relationship between Pygmalion and Galatea is inherently creepy. Catherine suggested a different angle, based on the possibility that Galatea wasn’t literally created by Aphrodite at the moment of metamorphosis from stone to flesh, but waiting within the stone for Pygmalion to bring her out. It sounds like a good basis for a short story; I'll have to credit her as a co-author if I get around to writing it.
Most of my digital relationships have not been as deep or as enduring as my relationship with Catherine. Making an enduring courtship out of an online exchange was hard enough; making a twenty-year marriage out of it was harder still. It required a great deal of effort on both our parts. Because we had not gone about things in the conventional way, there was no non-verbal communication. For the first few months there wasn’t even vocal communication. Without the internet our courtship would have been that of penpals. Even without the precedent of pre-internet penpals, our communication was still deliberate and intentional; we had to think through what we said to the other and consider how they might read it and what they might read between the lines.
That’s not easy. I certainly don’t do that for all or even most of my acquaintances online. I use that word deliberately, too. I am hesitant to call the people I chat with on the Fediverse friends, in part because Mark Zuckerberg ruined that word. On Facebook, everybody is a "friend" even if outside that platform your relationship with them is anything but friendly. You might ‘friend’ your parents or your boss on Facebook, but they are /not/ your friends because your relationship involves a power imbalance.
Even without Facebook making “friend” a catch-all term for every sort of relationship, I would still prefer to think of most of the people with whom I interact online as “acquaintances”. They can certainly be cordial or even fairly close acquaintances, but they aren’t people I would rely on in any meaningful fashion. I might ask acquaintances on the Fediverse if they know anybody looking to hire a developer, for example, but I would not count on them to know anybody or be willing and able to help me reach somebody in a position to hire.
This is likewise the case for my fellow Final Fantasy XIV players. The game is the basis for our acquaintance. They know me by the name I use in the game. They know that when I join their party, they can count on me to play my chosen role well. I’m usually a tank or a healer. These are demanding roles many other players are reluctant to take on, because the tank generally protects everybody else and the healer’s first responsibility is to keep the tank on their feet, but I play these roles because I relish the challenge. Other players depend on me in the game, but they don’t depend on me outside it. I, likewise, depend on other players to be good teammates but have no expectations of them beyond the game. I certainly don’t think any of them would hold an in-game funeral in my honor should word of my passing reach them.
Could I make friends out of some of my online acquaintances? Perhaps, but making friends takes effort even if you're neurotypical. I’m not, so making friends is harder. I generally prefer not to make that kind of effort. I likewise prefer not to offer the required vulnerability. I took off my armor for Catherine, but with everybody else I feel safer with it. I’m mostly content to have acquaintances instead of friends, even if you can’t depend on an acquaintance like you might a friend.
It’s a good thing I’m not single; what worked for me and Catherine back in 2000 might not work again. I think this is because online dating now means using phone applications that use opaque and proprietary algorithms designed by petty authoritarians bent on punishing the world because they couldn’t get laid in high school to match people by superficial characteristics and first impressions instead of relationships occurring organically online. The slow accretion of small affections and little intimacies that brought Catherine and I together seems almost impossible to recreate.
Then there are the people who reach out for just a moment, and then move on with their lives, but your impact on them might be greater than friendship. Last year, a woman wrote to me about a rant I had written because a dying man’s maudlin list of regrets annoyed me. I had written that one particular regret was far more amenable to generalization than its author believed. It involved getting medical attention when finding something weird about your body, like a lump that wasn’t previously there.
The woman who wrote to me said that my rant prodded her into getting a lump of her own checked out. Turned out she had breast cancer. It took me months to write back to her. I have no idea what happened to her in the meantime. I have no idea if I ended up saving that woman’s life. I hope so. I don’t want to be her friend, but I hope she’s come out the other side of her crisis and is happier now.
I know better than to echo the received wisdom of my youth and insist that online acquaintances aren’t real. It’s not that digital relationships aren’t real. If anything, they can be hyperreal. The right words on a page or a screen can pierce your defenses and make you feel in a way you might not let let yourself if those words were spoken in person. The right words from the wrong person can shatter you, especially if they come at the wrong time.
Who am I, really? Am I the unprepossessing middle-aged metalhead I seem to be in the “real world”? Am I the opinionated and occasionally insightful techie and science fantasy writer with delusions of erudition that I seem to be online? Am I the manic pixie nightmare catgirl who gives out catnip brownies before a fight that I play in Final Fantasy XIV? What if I am all of these things and none of them at the same time?
Online, you have no way of knowing. Online, I could be a dog for all you know. Online, I’m generally just a voice in the dark. Read enough of what I post and you might think you know me, or feel some kind of bond with me. Play with me online often enough and you might do the same. If you worked with me in the same office, you might also think you’ve come to know me. But you only see what I show you, and let your imagination fill in the blanks. The meaning you find in our interactions is mainly of your own making.
I do it, too. But I am wary of the result, and for that reason I am more cautious about digital relationships and about depending too much on online acquaintances than I was twenty-five years ago.
I am careful to remember that you too are just a voice in the dark. We have never spoken. We have never shared a meal together. We have never shaken hands or embraced. We have never stood side by side against a common enemy with our actual and only lives at stake. As tempting as it is to forget the body when online, we are not daemons or spirits without bodies. We are human beings, embodied and earthbound, and any bonds we forge should take that into account.
Every digital relationship is parasocial by default, even when seemingly reciprocated, unless the participants make an effort to build a more meaningful relationship from that beginning. Even I know this, and I'm autistic. What's your excuse?