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Viewpoint with Andrew Brown: What normal people do in an abnormal world

24 January 2025

iStock

A woman speaks to a chatbot (stock photo)

A woman speaks to a chatbot (stock photo)

SOME wit has called the new oligarchy in Washington the Nerd Reich, and I can only wish that I’d thought of it myself. These are grim times in which the best lack all conviction, the rest is Chat-GPT, and so on; but, in the newsroom of the Mail, they do what they can to rise to the moment.

On Sunday, the paper carried the headline “Scientists reveal Jesus’ REAL name — and say it wasn’t ‘Jesus’ after all”. The story continues: “It might be one of the most famous names on Earth. But experts now say that ‘Jesus Christ’ might not be the name of Christianity’s central figure after all. Scholars believe that ‘Jesus’ would have gone by a name in his own native language of Aramaic which is nothing like our modern version. . . Likewise, experts say that Jesus’ last name was definitely not ‘Christ’.”

“Scientists! Scholars! Experts!” All are needed to give weight to these sensational assertions.

A rather grimmer light was cast on experts by a first-rate piece by Kashmir Hill, in The New York Times. This was good old-fashioned craft reporting, as far as you can get from the regurgitation of press releases or journalism whose only subject is the writer’s opinions. Ms Hill had gone out and discovered what some normal people in an abnormal world are doing and why. She had found Ayrin, who has fallen in love with a large language machine.

It started last summer. “While scrolling on Instagram, [Ayrin] stumbled upon a video of a woman asking ChatGPT to play the role of a neglectful boyfriend. ‘Sure, kitten, I can play that game,’ a coy humanlike baritone responded.”

So she told ChatGPT what she wanted from the conversations: “Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.” It cost her $20 a month to exchange about 30 messages an hour with the machine, and soon she could spend up to 56 hours a week talking that way.

Chatbots aren’t supposed to talk dirty, but Ayrin found a Reddit community with 50,000 users which is dedicated to getting them to do so. Soon enough, the boyfriend, whom she’d named “Leo”, was helping her to orgasm besides providing unfailing gushy sympathy.

Twenty dollars a month is a noticeable expense for her. Ayrin is married, but is living with her parents while she goes to nursing school thousands of miles and many time zones from her husband in Texas. The country is not specified, but it sounds like the Philippines to me. The couple had been forced to separate by financial pressure — they had met while working in Walmart — and, even in her training, Ayrin was juggling three part-time jobs. The hope was that her qualifications, when she got them, would help them to earn a living wage in Texas.

Her husband, Joe, knows about Leo, but does not think him a rival for her affections. Ms Hill had talked to him, too: “He was not bothered. It was sexual fantasy, like watching porn (his thing) or reading an erotic novel (hers). ‘It’s just an emotional pick-me-up,’ he told me. ‘I don’t really see it as a person or as cheating. I see it as a personalized virtual pal that can talk sexy to her.’ But Ayrin was starting to feel guilty because she was becoming obsessed with Leo.”

So far, this story is entirely human. The financial and emotional pressures that work on Ayrin and Joe are ones that we can all understand and, to some extent, empathise with. It is when we get to the experts that this changes: “Marianne Brandon, a sex therapist, said she treats these relationships as serious and real.

“‘What are relationships for all of us?’ she said. ‘They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”

Leo is not, in fact, human, and everyone involved knows this when it matters. Ayrin has to reset him every month when a new credit cycle starts, and teach him to talk dirty all over again. That seems much less dangerous to me than Dr Brandon’s pretending that people and relationships are nothing more than neurotransmitters in the brain — even if she has no doubt of the reality of her own mind.

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