{"id":2792,"date":"2023-10-14T15:28:07","date_gmt":"2023-10-14T15:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2023\/10\/14\/the-emergence-of-artificial-intelligence-girlfriends\/"},"modified":"2023-10-14T15:28:07","modified_gmt":"2023-10-14T15:28:07","slug":"the-emergence-of-artificial-intelligence-girlfriends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2023\/10\/14\/the-emergence-of-artificial-intelligence-girlfriends\/","title":{"rendered":"The Emergence of Artificial Intelligence Girlfriends"},"content":{"rendered":"


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One of the most telling statistics from the General Social Survey, is\u00a0that Americans are having less sex now than they did in 1980s and 1990s<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Young men especially have become less sexually active. Since 2008, the share of men under 30 reporting no sex at all has nearly tripled.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This stat is one of the clearest signs of what has turned into a counterintuitive but reliable pattern. The more \u201cliberated\u201d and \u201cprogressive\u201d our culture becomes, the less interested in or capable of finding human partners we become.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I say, \u201chuman partners,\u201d because the decline of sex and the rise of high-tech sex alternatives have gone hand-in-hand. Online pornography use, for instance, has become ubiquitous.\u00a0The Institute for Family Studies reported<\/a>\u00a0in 2022 that a majority of men ages 30-49 say they\u2019ve watched pornography in the past month. And\u00a0given the connection between porn and male sexual dysfunctions<\/a>, this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, another emerging alternative to real women will likely draw even more men into unreality.\u00a0British freelance writer Freya India recently highlighted the phenomenon<\/a>\u00a0of AI girlfriends, describing an array of new apps like Replika, Intimate, and Dream Girl Builder, which offer men the chance to craft \u201cflawless\u201d digital partners.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

These apps promise AI-airbrushed pornography. Users customize body type, face shape, and hair color to \u201ccreate their dream companion,\u201d that will \u201cexceed [their] wildest desires,\u201d and can join them on \u201chyper-realistic voice calls.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

These apps offer not only simulated sex, but also the promise of companionship and emotional attention. As India writes:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Eva AI, for example, not only lets you choose the perfect face and body but customise the perfect personality, offering options like \u201chot, funny, bold\u201d, \u201cshy, modest, considerate\u201d and \u201csmart, strict, rational\u201d. Create a girlfriend who is judgement-free! Who lets you hang out with your buddies without drama! Who laughs at all your jokes! \u201cControl it all the way you want to,\u201d promises Eva AI. Design a girl who is \u201calways on your side\u201d, says Replika.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That last app\u00a0has been downloaded more than 20 million times,<\/a>\u00a0and the industry seems poised to boom,\u00a0with NBC reporting<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cAds for AI sex workers are flooding Instagram and TikTok.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t an expansion of sexual and romantic freedom or a tool that empowers people to make human connections. Rather, it is a\u00a0retreat\u00a0from human connection, a turning away from the very thing for which we are biologically, socially, and emotionally wired.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet this has always been the end of the road we started on long ago, when we mixed a commitment to hyper-individualism with technology. As Sherry Turkle observed over a decade ago in her book,\u00a0Alone Together,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0the process started with living our lives on the internet. Soon we began exploring alternative identities through social media. We crafted these identities and connections to perfection, pruning our \u201cfriends lists\u201d to include only those people who pleased us. Before long, we came to prefer these digital relationships on our terms to the messy and often frustrating demands of in-person relationships.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now we have reached the stage at which many would rather cut out humans altogether, opting instead for \u201cdrama-free\u201d companions who never have bad days, never grow old, always laugh at our jokes, never ask anything of us, and can be simply \u201cpaused\u201d if it suits us. And AI technology is here to fill that demand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next? C.S. Lewis was among many science-fiction authors to speculate. In\u00a0That Hideous Strength,\u00a0<\/em>the last book of his\u00a0Space Trilogy,\u00a0<\/em>he describes corrupted inhabitants of the Moon who do not sleep with each other when they marry, but \u201ceach lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty \u2026 in their dreams of lust.\u201d Perhaps AI girlfriends will eventually become robotic girlfriends, deceiving users into truly giving up on human relationships.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what insanity! We were never made for such nightmares. We were created with bodies for embodied relationships \u2014 among them the one-flesh union of marriage, through which God gives children. And at the heart of Christianity is the message that God values our embodied natures so highly that, in Christ, He assumed that nature in order to save us. Our human relationships don\u2019t need replacing. They need redemption.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As our culture\u2019s retreat from humanity reaches new levels of strangeness, the task of the Church may increasingly be to call our neighbors\u00a0back\u00a0<\/em>to being human. Few would have expected Christians to get a reputation for being the \u201cpro-sex people,\u201d but if falling in love with a computer is the alternative, we may be well on our way.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Originally published at BreakPoint.\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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John Stonestreet serves as president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He\u2019s a sought-after author and speaker on areas of faith and culture, theology, worldview, education and apologetics.\u00a0\u00a0
Shane Morris\u00a0is a senior writer at the Colson Center, where he has been the resident Calvinist and millennial, home-school grad since 2010, and an intern under Chuck Colson. He writes BreakPoint commentaries and columns. Shane has also written for\u00a0The Federalist,\u00a0The Christian Post, and Summit Ministries, and he blogs regularly for Patheos Evangelical as Troubler of Israel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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iStock\/ratpack223 One of the most telling statistics from the General Social Survey, is\u00a0that Americans are having less sex now than they did in 1980s and 1990s.\u00a0\u00a0 Young men especially have become less sexually active. Since 2008, the share of men under 30 reporting no sex at all has nearly tripled.\u00a0\u00a0 This stat is one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[]},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}