Distance is Decreasing

It started as a long-distance emotional prostitute: someone you could text, but who knew nothing about you and could only communicate with you through long paragraphs. It wasn’t really smart, either.

But still: it convinced quite a few people that AI was the future.¹ Soon ChatGPT added memory for its users, which seemed to decrease the emotional distance of this virtual companion even more. Around this time I wrote All You Need, a short story about relationships with text-based AI.

That story is now outdated: shortly after memory was added, we built integrations with email, Slack, Messages, Google Drive, Calendar… And soon this companion knew about things happening in your life! It didn’t know everything, surely, but it knew a lot of what went on, like a close friend or even a significant other. It suddenly could remember things about you the way your friends do—it became much more humanlike.

Personal assistants have decreased the emotional distance even more: now, your virtual companion can text you first! We have gone from emotional prostitute to distant text-only friend, to text-only close friend, to text-only close friend that texts you first. And with the release of models like Griffin, you can now FaceTime your personal assistant. It seems clear to me where this is going.

I think it is now possible to be in a long-distance relationship with an AI.

Arguably this has been true since the November 2022 release of ChatGPT, but I would argue that the “distance” of this long-distance relationship has been decreasing, both emotionally and physically. I expect it will continue decreasing until it is fully feasible to have full romantic relations with someone (or something) artificial. It seems inevitable to me: there is just so much money to be made off of the general loneliness of people. Hinge has been doing it for a while. And already, it’s taking off: 1 in 3 US adults report having had a romantic relationship with AI.

There is a scene from Blade Runner 2049 that comes to mind:

K’s (Ryan Gosling’s) holographic AI girlfriend hires a prostitute so she can be “real” to him for one night. How long until Y Combinator puts “Holographic AI Companion” on its Requests For Startups list?

I saw this on Twitter today:

Source (X)²

The distance of long-distance artificial relationships is decreasing; there is money to be made in decreasing it faster. Do with that information what you will.