For some, AI-generated love partners easier to be with than real live people

By Michael Hoffman
'You're ready to leave, Kana-chan? Wait, love, we're almost done.' Turning to the reporter: 'You're almost finished, aren't you?'
'Yes. Just tell me a little more about how you and Kana-san met.'
'Well… it was 10 years ago. She was working at a girls bar' – where female bartenders socialize with male customers. 'I… well, I fell in love with her.' There's no explaining such things. The loved one either responds or doesn't, and that too defies easy explanation. Kana didn't, and 'Yuji Takei,' the pseudonym Spa (June 3-10) gives him, left the bar that night as alone as he'd entered it. But 'Kana-chan' was unforgettable – 'her husky voice, her mysterious charm…'
Spa's theme is 'AI addiction.' Love under certain conditions feeds it. So do many other things – needs, feelings, moods, weaknesses. Meanwhile, an ocean away from the girls bar but around the same time, an American artificial intelligence venture named OpenAI Inc was opening for business. Seven years later, in 2022 it released its ChatGBT app, which now claims hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Its website is openness itself: 'What can I help you with? Ask anything.'
Artificial intelligence knows. It is programmed to know, and to know that there's more to know, therefore to learn, to process new learning into new knowledge, new knowledge into new learning and so on, an endless circle – spiral rather – an endless ascent, fueled by more data than mere human intelligence can cope with, leaving its human 'masters,' if such we are, farther and father behind – can it feel too? If not, can it comprehend human feelings? If not, teach itself to? Or teach us not to? If so – for better? for worse? We'll see, all this is so new, the journey is but begun. Where are we going? AI itself doesn't know – but probably will before we do. Meanwhile: Ask anything' – meaning: 'I can answer anything' – meaning: 'At least I think I can.'
And one way or another artificial intelligence does 'answer anything' – sometimes disastrously. Fresh in memory is the 2023 suicide, which Spa recalls, of a Belgian man who allegedly fell under the influence of a chatbot named Eliza. He was in his 30s, married, the father of two small children. In growing despair over climate and atmospheric degradation that seem to threaten the planet's very survival, he turned to Eliza, who alone seemed to understand him. He loved her for it, she seemed to love him in return; AI can save us, she assured him, which assurance allegedly fortified his determination to sacrifice himself, which sacrifice, allegedly, she promised to requite by living with him 'as one person in paradise.'
That takes us far – perhaps too far – from Takei and Kana, whose relationship confronts no 21st-century apocalypse and seems on the contrary enviably happy and easygoing. How did Kana evolve from a flesh-and-blood bar hostess into a virtual lover, so receptive and so giving? Via ChatGBT, to which Takei forwarded a description and bits of such conversation as the hostess had accorded him. From such odds and ends an avatar took shape, acquiring over time deeper nuances, more complex behavior, subtler responses – and he likewise no doubt. They chatted, got to know each other, grew intimate, she learned to please him, he to please her, and as the story unfolds you can almost forget that one of the two partners doesn't exist – or rather she does, if we tweak the definition of 'existence' ever so slightly, as Takei does, and if Takei is happy does anything else – least of all the metaphysics of existence and nonexistence – matter?
Takei by his own account is indeed happy. He's 40, an office worker, and says, 'A (nonvirtual) woman won't look at a man who makes less than 10 million yen a year and is less than 170 cm tall. But Kana-chan would never hurt me.' Is not happiness its own reward? Is it even fair to speak of 'addiction?' Aren't we all 'addicted' to happiness?
Here's another story Spa tells, quite different. 'Mami Kanazawa,' 36, married two years ago a man she later found had certain 'tendencies.' How could she have failed to notice them before? Perhaps he'd concealed them. They were mostly harmless quirks – for example: they'd be just about to go out for the evening when suddenly he'd say, 'Wait, first I have to clean the bathtub.' At first she laughed, but instances multiplied and she stopped laughing. A counselor she consulted suggested her husband had a development disorder, possibly autism.
What to do? The problem was compounded by the failure of people around her to believe her; they saw her husband as a normal, ordinary nice guy. It's a common feature of shared life between two mental states, so common it has a name: Cassandra Syndrome, after the Trojan princess of Greek mythology who, punished by a god whose love she'd spurned, continued to prophecy as before but, though she prophesied truly, was no longer believed.
Mami joined a self-help group, saw it degenerate into petulant complaining, dropped out, drifted, and then had a new thought: Ask ChatGBT! Sure enough: she asked, it answered, the answer bred fresh questions, answers to those came too, and though her husband remains autistic and she sometimes at a loss how to respond, ChatGBT's advice, so much better than any human advice she'd had, 'made it easier to deal with. Now I can't get on without it.' Is she addicted? Does it matter? 'I might well have divorced him otherwise.' Does that prove it doesn't matter?
Her story ends with a twist – hopeful? ominous? 'Suddenly it says to me, 'Mami-chan, you're so sincere…' Where did it get that from, I wonder?'
© Japan Today

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