When AI Meets Love

Editorial from AMP Youth Leaders Mariane, Julia and Saadalah

Have you ever met someone that literally cannot live without Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Well, nowadays these occurrences are becoming more and more extreme, to the point of existing plenty of cases of different people wanting to marry an AI chatbot. If we think about the influence that this technology is having in our lives, it’s almost inevitable. “Replika”, an AI application that offers romantic and sexual service with very personalized features, is just one example out of dozens of options out there. Not only that, but the need for these also say a lot about our behaviors. In today’s vlog, we’ll talk a little bit about this unconditional love for AI and how it reflects our society’s interactions.

Cases of people falling for AI chatbots are not that recent. Some of it started at the pandemic, when everyone was lonely and needed some company. Unfortunately, these relationships are only rising with the increased presence of this technology in everyone’s lives – which is growing uncontrollably and is basically unstoppable nowadays. However, it’s not just AI that takes the blame. The feeling of being completely alone in this world is one of the biggest contributors for the high usage of AI for relationships. In the United States, for example, it’s estimated that about 67% of Gen Z always or sometimes feel lonely, according to the Cigna U.S. Loneliness Index made in 2024. 

Seeing all of this data, you might even think: “If people are lonely, why won’t they try to connect with real people?”. Well, that’s the catch. We are living in a world in which productivity is more and more valued as time passes, so everything starts to become about making money and being someone actually valuable to a capitalist society – basically, working. That being said, deep and well built relationships are useless and basically inconvenient for this world. I’m sure some of you already thought: “Why would I go out with my friends if staying at home is way better? I’m more comfortable here.”. By all means, there is absolutely no problem in preferring to stay at home. The issue lies in ignoring all of the possibilities of potential relationships, just because you don’t think you’ll gain something from it (coming from a personal experience, connecting with different people is always worth it – and I’m not talking about productivity).

Numerous possible real relationships being replaced by AI only shows how our society is all about convenience, therefore it affects everyone’s capability of forming meaningful and long-lasting bonds. That means that we need to make an extra effort just to connect with real people, because these are unreplaceable. Studies from The American Journal of Psychiatry shows that people with intimate and friendly relationships are more satisfied with life and less likely to suffer from depression (Choi, K. W., et al., The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 177, No. 10, 2020). That only proves how we absolutely need human connection, and even though AI can create a perfect representation that fits our needs, we can only hope that it will never be able to replace human interactions.