Dr. bird Made the Marie Claire Deadline About AI Girlfriends

Here’s the fullness of what I sent to the UK reporter for Marie Claire. We’ll see if and what they choose to include from my critical media ecological commentary.

Questions

• What are the ethical implications of designing AI to simulate romantic or sexual relationships?

My critical media ecological work looks at the way a limited idea of humanness and human intelligence has been built into most every global institution. While, that may not seem relevant to the design of AI girlfriends in particular it’s actually the colonial capitalist bias at their core. Thanks to hundreds of years of colonial capitalist trained humans, who acted as media in society building process, we have come to take these logics (manifest destiny, quantification, Objectivity, etc.) and practices (monochronic time, standardization, datafication, etc.) for granted. And they are built into everything, including our own minds and bodies, as well as the educational systems that shape us (for better and worse). Regardless of intention, colonialism butchers everything as a paradigm. And colonial-minded humans laid eugenics as our rotten foundation. To this day, it disconnects us from our bodies. It makes our relationships violent. And it disconnect us from community, focusing on mind-assumed logic at the expense of embodied emotions, controlling everything. Then, industrialized and neoliberal capitalisms put a price tag on all of that, contaminating and devastating our minds, bodies, and the Earth (especially in the Global South). This is why I have been correcting for years that (despite popularized Internet inaccuracies) there is not simply a “male loneliness epidemic,” but a global loneliness epidemic, experienced by nearly everyone (especially non-English speaking, disabled, Black and Brown folks left behind since C19 began). My work connects all of this to why rates of sexual violences are so high, why rapists are commonly people who their victims/survivors know, and yet their crimes against us are almost never appropriately criminalized. It’s also why the cisheterosexual orgasm gap exists. Because most of us have never been deemed fully human, and the most intimately human experience, besides love, is sexuality. And why so many people romanticize abuse. It’s also why elitist institutions who allegedly churn out the “greatest minds,” for better and worse, lead us to believe our bodies are machines. The way we use language builds our worlds, and is the closest thing that we have to magic. People forget that for most of human history our ancestors weren’t given access to literacy. Meaning, they only knew what they knew, that was passed down via repeating spoken language and lived knowledges. Now, even with all the medias we have today, we still only know what we know. Everything becomes normal in repetition, and everything is connected. As our ancestors did, we continue to, literally and figuratively, live under dominant spells. Spells written by biased religious, political, or scientific canon who didn’t see most us as fully human, and who wrote laws, articles, and books anyway. They prothetized from their limited perspectives to our ancestors, who knew better, but were often given little choice but to assimilate or be eliminated. Patriarchal imperialist white supremacists created ideas of whiteness and then reinforced their reductive ideas of humanness and other civilization myths. These figures in history books built everything from their limited minds, and therefore, everything they built was infested with their biases: that the rest of us are mere objects to be captured, exploited, and used to phallogocentric mind and hearts content. And now, as I talk about at length in my newest book, We Are F**king Machines: Why We Are Like This and What We Can Do About It, these same limited ideas of humanness were built into artificial intelligence as well. Regardless of intention, these are the ethical implications that sociohistorically ground the design and colonial capitalist profit centric incentive of designing AI girlfriends.

• Thinking about AI girlfriends specifically, how might AI affect young people's views on relationships and intimacy?

People forget that most of us haven’t been properly comprehensively sexually educated, especially in the United States. And the issue of United States centralism is built into global technologies as well. Likewise, generations upon generations of improperly sexually educated people have gone on to build quite literally everything in our global society. Some continue to write sexually miseducated laws, and regardless of intention, their impact is a reinforcement of covert and overt sexually violent dynamics. Research makes it clear that when someone isn’t comprehensively sexually educated they are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence and are less likely to be able to self-advocate to protect themselves from said violences. Instead, federally funded, medically inaccurate, and fear mongering abstinence-only sex education is built into most u.s. citizens as features. This includes Ayn Rand worshipping, singularity aiming, simulation theory enthusiasts in Silicon Valley who then go on to act as media in society building processes, building AI girlfriends. Before and after the Internet, as far as we know, there is only a small segment of the population who consider themselves “objectum sexuals” aka those who are romantically and/or sexually attracted to objects (cars, the Eiffel tour, bridges, etc.). Since technological advancements, like the Internet which bore teledildonics (also known as cyberdildonics), there are also those who consider themselves “digisexuals” because their sexual orientation or preferences center around technologies (dildos, vibrators, biomemetics, etc.). Some say the latter mediated sexualities are beneficial or neutral. My work explores the implications of treating efficient and intense orgasms, thanks to sex devices, like a feminist win, sexual pursuit, or end goal of sexuality. But, again, we are in sociosexually violent ecology and a global loneliness epidemic. And unfortunately, many parts of the Internet have made it abundantly clear that the McDonald’s ball pit is apparently algorithmically attached to the redpill pipeline, manufacturing new violent gooners and incels. Whether it’s mass shootings or rapes, they’re sure not afraid to shoot their fucking shots. Often we see commentary blaming technologies wholesale because that’s an easy played out dunk, like blaming iPads for kids socializing difficulties. To me, what’s more important is that we contextualize, unpack, and really become honest as to the how, why, to who’s profitable benefit, and to who’s real consequence these products are being sold.

• Could the customisation of AI partners reinforce harmful stereotypes or unhealthy dynamics?

In the case of the uncashable future technological promises that venture capitalists and tech bros have tried to sell us, their alleged humanoid intelligent AI sex robots — no matter the level of customization — are usually little more than a typical PornHub variety of stereotypically fetishized (infantilized, innocent, promiscuous, unconsenting, ignorant, inhuman, etc.) idea of people assigned female at birth, designed and sold to be sexually used by mostly male consumers for profit. Some folks have argued that AI and sex robots can serve as a “human victim replacement” for pedophiles and other violent predators who often lurk and infest the dark web, sharing all the horrors of the human experience they can disseminate. On the other hand, these AI sexbot companies have often been criticized for trafficking in little more than simulated horror-show candy to pedophiles and other social dangers to us. Imagine any pro and anti porn argument, just rebranded for additional male centric profit. As these technologies advance, they also pose the same endlessly horrific risks as deep fakes. On a differently grim note, AI is driving people (who believe social myths that it is sentient and offers “otherworldly secrets,” rather than human biases, made up information, and sources) into psychosis. At worst, just recently, we saw that a teen took their own life at the recommendation of their AI girlfriend. Overall, I have argued that most folks who design these AI girlfriends and sex robots largely suffer from “womb envy”, my terminological spin on Freud’s ignorant term “penis envy”. Serious jokes aside, their mediated replicas cannot and will never be identical to living, breathing, sentient humans. And either way the dehumanizing, profitable, and demoralizing implications of selling these objects as such, when most of us aren’t deemed fully human, are clear. The main argument in my dissertation about the sociosexually violent u.s. ecology is that hundreds of years of the mechanization of humans is now flipping into the humanization of objects. I updated and expanded that project into my new book. For these reasons and more, in it, I dedicated an entire chapter to artificial intelligence, urging readers and listeners to remember that these products have been designed by biased humans to mimic limited ideas of humanity, replicating eugenics, and they only further divide us. At the end, I also connect how out of one side of this unsustainable system’s mouth it bastardizes autistic folks for not assimilating into nonautistic social norms, and yet out of the other, billionaires invested $200 billion into AI alone this year, with the explicit intention to continue dividing and conquering us all, as they continue to steal and horde our wealth while most of us can’t even afford basic needs. While these phenomena may seem separate, they are both man-i-festations of eugenics.

• How might AI girlfriends reinforce traditional gender norms?

I spoke to this a lot in my first answer to this question, but to reiterate: The designers of AI girlfriends act as media in global society building processes. Regardless of intention, they build their binary gendered biases into the design of these technologies. Because of their likely lack of comprehensive sex education, they mainly have reductive colonial capitalist ideas of binary gender and biological sex to build their AI and sex robots from. Think of human biases like clay, and their products as a sculpture. They’re effectively molding ableist, racialized, and gendered stereotypes already programmed into “nurturing, responsive, subservient” AI assistants like Siri, Alexa (or now, convincingly human mimicking large language models, like ChatGPT) and making them have a baby with a sexually biomimicking roomba (also known to destroy our homes), and calling it a “humanoid intelligent AI robot companion”. When any technology is introduced, media ecologists of all kinds can attest to the fact that, they influence every level of our global ecology. These inclinations are often ignored or dismissed. And speaking of denial, sex negative folks often follow a similar pattern when they ignore the fact that many sex workers have shared that their customers come to see them for the human experience they provide, not just to have sex with them. In the case of AI girlfriends and sex robots, limited intelligence colonial capitalist biases are so pervasive, and global consumers are so statistically touch-starved, lonely, unwilling to process their trauma, unlearn violent miseducation, and work to become better partners that, many choose to masturbate into these stereotypically designed ventriloquist dolls anyway. All in all, products like AI girlfriends and sex robots sold to “solve” human “sexual syncing issues” are merely one man-i-festation of this colonial capitalist system that diverts systemic problems (continuing to exploit, contaminate, sicken, disable, and kill us all) onto us as individuals. At the end of the day, what we really need are fundamental human changes to education and the entire current system, to begin processing our intergenerational trauma, liberate us all, and regenerate ecological symbiosis.