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The rise of AI girlfriends: Our human relationships don’t need replacing. They need redemption.
Christian Post ^ | 10/14/23 | John Stonestreet, G. Shane Morris

Posted on 10/14/2023 4:51:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind

One of the most telling statistics from the General Social Survey, is that Americans are having less sex now than they did in 1980s and 1990s.

Young men especially have become less sexually active. Since 2008, the share of men under 30 reporting no sex at all has nearly tripled.

This stat is one of the clearest signs of what has turned into a counterintuitive but reliable pattern. The more “liberated” and “progressive” our culture becomes, the less interested in or capable of finding human partners we become.

I say, “human partners,” 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. The Institute for Family Studies reported in 2022 that a majority of men ages 30-49 say they’ve watched pornography in the past month. And given the connection between porn and male sexual dysfunctions, this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

Now, another emerging alternative to real women will likely draw even more men into unreality. British freelance writer Freya India recently highlighted the phenomenon of AI girlfriends, describing an array of new apps like Replika, Intimate, and Dream Girl Builder, which offer men the chance to craft “flawless” digital partners.

These apps promise AI-airbrushed pornography. Users customize body type, face shape, and hair color to “create their dream companion,” that will “exceed [their] wildest desires,” and can join them on “hyper-realistic voice calls.”

These apps offer not only simulated sex, but also the promise of companionship and emotional attention. As India writes:

Eva AI, for example, not only lets you choose the perfect face and body but customise the perfect personality, offering options like “hot, funny, bold”, “shy, modest, considerate” and “smart, strict, rational”. Create a girlfriend who is judgement-free! Who lets you hang out with your buddies without drama! Who laughs at all your jokes! “Control it all the way you want to,” promises Eva AI. Design a girl who is “always on your side”, says Replika.

That last app has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and the industry seems poised to boom, with NBC reporting that “Ads for AI sex workers are flooding Instagram and TikTok.”

This isn’t an expansion of sexual and romantic freedom or a tool that empowers people to make human connections. Rather, it is a retreat from human connection, a turning away from the very thing for which we are biologically, socially, and emotionally wired.

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, Alone Together, the 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 “friends lists” 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.

Now we have reached the stage at which many would rather cut out humans altogether, opting instead for “drama-free” companions who never have bad days, never grow old, always laugh at our jokes, never ask anything of us, and can be simply “paused” if it suits us. And AI technology is here to fill that demand.

What’s next? C.S. Lewis was among many science-fiction authors to speculate. In That Hideous Strength, the last book of his Space Trilogy, he describes corrupted inhabitants of the Moon who do not sleep with each other when they marry, but “each 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 … in their dreams of lust.” Perhaps AI girlfriends will eventually become robotic girlfriends, deceiving users into truly giving up on human relationships.

But what insanity! We were never made for such nightmares. We were created with bodies for embodied relationships — 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’t need replacing. They need redemption.

As our culture’s retreat from humanity reaches new levels of strangeness, the task of the Church may increasingly be to call our neighbors back to being human. Few would have expected Christians to get a reputation for being the “pro-sex people,” but if falling in love with a computer is the alternative, we may be well on our way.


Originally published at BreakPoint.

John Stonestreet serves as president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He’s a sought-after author and speaker on areas of faith and culture, theology, worldview, education and apologetics.


Shane Morris is 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 The Federalist, The Christian Post, and Summit Ministries, and he blogs regularly for Patheos Evangelical as Troubler of Israel.


TOPICS: Computers/Internet; Society
KEYWORDS: ai; girlfriends; relationship
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To: Jonty30

AI is creepy.

Just nope.


41 posted on 10/14/2023 9:27:18 PM PDT by Salamander (Please visit my profile page help save my beloved dog's life. https://www.givesendgo.com/G2FUF.)
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To: alternatives?

The prime attractiveness-to-men time span for women is 18-28 years old. Successful men are not generally interested in women who have passed beyond that window.

It’s called biology. It’s called life.


42 posted on 10/14/2023 9:33:22 PM PDT by Jeff Chandler (THE ISSUE IS NEVER THE ISSUE. THE REVOLUTION IS THE ISSUE.)
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To: Salamander

As a practicing veterinarian (primarily equine/exotics) for over 45 years, i truly understand your anguish and sorrow. When all is said and done, and it becomes “time” , i know that you know not to be selfish until the suffering is worse. Good dogs are hard to come by, but I believe that they will always find you. The dogs that have passed dearly loved you, but it’s not against their memories when you find your next canine partner. Good dogs love their parents so much that they tell the other dog spirits that you are deserving of their love, too. That hole in your heart can be filled not by replacements, but by the next dog that needs your rescue and attention. Have your heart open, and a good dog that needs you will be there.
I know that good people get found by good dogs. Both sides get the love they need.

Prayers for you.


43 posted on 10/14/2023 9:54:04 PM PDT by drSteve78 (Je suis Deplorable. Even more so)
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To: Jonty30

As a young woman (and even as a child), I lead a solitary existence. Despite being one of 5 siblings, I enjoyed singular pursuits over groups, alone time over the crowd, and fitting in with the pack was irrelevant to me. I was not a rebel without a clue, mind you; I simply found a lot of people my age to be silly and reckless.

I knew I was different and was okay with that.

Had I not met my husband, I would not have married. Like me, he values his space and alone time, likes being self-reliant, and isn’t concerned with fads, gossip, etc. Before we met, I was already planning to move to a different part of the country where I could live comfortably on just one income.

Not a lot of people can handle that level of solitude. They stay stuck in relationships that make them miserable because they can’t handle being alone. They don’t have a core or accomplishments that feed their soul.

I’m like you. My time is too valuable to waste on a bad relationship.

When you find someone who is a good person and gets you, you make sure they enjoy the time they spend with you and build a beautiful life together.

Thirty years later that good man is still by my side.


44 posted on 10/14/2023 10:04:26 PM PDT by TheWriterTX (🇺🇸✝️🇮🇱)
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To: SeekAndFind
IMHO AI is a dead end, as much as some will say they are satisfied , that an artificial girlfriend is enough it’ll be a lie. Humans need human contact almost as much as they need food and water. The lack of real contact and relationships will distort and diminish a person in the long run. IMG-6774
45 posted on 10/15/2023 3:58:12 AM PDT by The Louiswu (Pray for Peace in the world.)
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To: SeekAndFind

Man who has AI girlfriends also have sheep.

C. Chan


46 posted on 10/15/2023 8:26:59 AM PDT by Vaduz (....)
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To: SeekAndFind

AI girlfriends are like the KPOP korean girl bands.
Here are the AI bands....
https://lycheethelabel.com/blogs/blog/kpop-girl-groups


47 posted on 10/15/2023 3:56:28 PM PDT by minnesota_bound (Need more money to buy everything now)
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To: SeekAndFind

Top Gear James May reacts to AI versions of himself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhou-yXBNYA
There is a fly on a window behind him that is pulling my attention away....


48 posted on 10/15/2023 4:09:14 PM PDT by minnesota_bound (Need more money to buy everything now)
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To: alternatives?

For the top 5%-10% of men, it’s “why buy one cow when the milk is free”, from a wide assortment of eager cows.

For the rest of men, it’s “ why pay inflated prices for a used-up cow that won’t give you the same milk she used to give away for free”?

And women hitting the wall gave the nerve to look surprised.


49 posted on 10/15/2023 5:16:38 PM PDT by grey_whiskers ( The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: Lazamataz

Laz, you just *defined* LONGitude.
😁


50 posted on 10/15/2023 5:18:08 PM PDT by grey_whiskers ( The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: janetjanet998

“You can change any man with gentle nagging’’.- Marge Simpson.


51 posted on 10/15/2023 9:35:09 PM PDT by jmacusa (Liberals. Too stupid to be idiots.)
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To: alternatives?

“Why traditional conservative writers can’t figure this out and write about many young women’s poor choices. “

Indeed. So much of the focus is on “What’s wrong with young men today?” And the elephant in the room is “What’s wrong with young women today?”

Today I happened to notice my local (conservative) Catholic parish’s “young adult group” sharing a meal at a local restaurant. I’m not young and had no idea until today how their membership breaks down, but I was quite surprised to see approximately 12 young men and exactly 2 young women. Needless to say, those are terrible odds for the guys. The whole idea of those parish “young adult groups” is and always has been for the kids to find suitable, like-minded spouses. But what happens when only one side shows up?


52 posted on 10/15/2023 9:53:54 PM PDT by irishjuggler
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