Marital tension? It’s time to bring in a third party

I’ve been quite sick this last week, so I have been delegating my parenting responsibilities to Disney+ . While my kids mainlined Tangled and whatever else the algorithm dictates, I’ve been folded into the corner of the couch, trapped in an internet black hole. The journey started innocently enough. Who voices Tangled’s hero, Flynn Rider? (Answer: Zachary Levi - weird dude). It ended hours later in some Subreddit where people were having pretty spirited discussions about the age gap between Rapunzel (18) and Flynn (27). Through it all, my kids have barely stirred.

My assigning of family duties may be cause for concern, but it is also gloriously modern. Just as algorithms now raise children, robot vacuums roam houses, music is written by machines and people are outsourcing romantic relationships to AI chatbots. This last intrusion into analog life, more than most, has caused an avalanche of hand-wringing and moral panic that, to my mind, is completely unjustified. The AI chatbot partner is an underappreciated example of technology making people happy.

Imagine if the key to marital bliss could be found in chatbots.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Now, before I delve into the benefits of AI relationships, I should make clear: I am married to a sentient being who has been a saint while I’ve been on my sickbed. He does, however, sometimes suggest (tersely) that I clean up after myself, and he’s also built our entire kitchen around the singular goal of having 60 litres of plant-based milk in close proximity at all times.

This is precisely why I have empathy for those in bot relationships. I can see how finding solace in the make-believe chatbot world might reduce some day-to-day tension. Where one party to a couple exists only inside a phone, there can be no conflict about the menial marital sore points – there is no task allocation, no sharing of space, no discussion about how much Bonsoy is too much.

There are also obvious benefits for the next generation and for those of us parenting them. Since my children were born, I have lived in perpetual fear of each of them one day leaving the family home for an idiot. With the benefit of AI partners, this is a worry I might never need to face. While my generation introduced long-suffering parents to a stream of completely inappropriate potential partners, if AI love goes mainstream, we may never have to endure our children making terrible choices. Alternatively, maybe we all end up on speakerphone or in group chats with bots that sound like they are only a few niche podcasts away from joining Zachary Levi in an unvaccinated hellscape.

The primary objection to these AI lovers seems to be that those who partake are being deprived of more tangible connection. The reasoning follows, I suppose, that the future of humanity may be at risk. Indeed, it’s a sort of won’t-somebody-think-of-the-future-children-who-won’t-exist moral panic that focuses on the weirdest things people are inclined to do with new technology (marry it) and ignores the many times similar threats have arisen. I’m convinced this won’t come to pass.

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I recall a time in primary school when my parents brought home an old Mac with a pre-internet chatbot called Eliza installed in it. My sisters and I spent a few weeks studying it for signs of sentience so that we could become like the kids from Ghostwriter. Then we lost interest. The same cycle was repeated a few years later when we were desperate for Tamagotchi and then forgot about them within a few months. By the early noughties, we’d moved onto torturing Sims by building houses with no toilets. In each iteration, we were alive with the possibilities of the technology and then, over time, bored by its limitations. Eliza never assumed the role of an actual friend, our Tamagotchis did not replace the desire for actual pets and my siblings and I all went on to have families and home plumbing.