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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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1 posted on 10/14/2023 4:51:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

This could get bad

Star Trek- Harry Mudd With Multiple Nagging Wives
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-s0N8Mviig0&pp=ygUQaGFycnkgbXVkZCB3aWZlIA%3D%3D


2 posted on 10/14/2023 4:52:42 PM PDT by janetjanet998 (Legacy media including youtube are the enemy of the people and must die)
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To: SeekAndFind

“Since 2008, the share of men under 30 reporting no sex at all has nearly tripled.”

Not to worry, I banked a lot in the 70s. They are still working off my surplus.


3 posted on 10/14/2023 4:57:53 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom (“Occupy your mind with good thoughts or your enemy will fill them with bad ones.” ~ Thomas More)
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To: SeekAndFind

An AI companion would be ok for conversation purposes, because it could probably find information on your interest faster than you could yourself.

I plan to name mine Data. Or should I name him Data?


4 posted on 10/14/2023 4:59:25 PM PDT by Jonty30 (It never rains in sunny Alberta. It always rains in rainy Alberta.)
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To: ProtectOurFreedom

It’s called hypergamy. If youre mot a 666, women want nothing to do with you.


5 posted on 10/14/2023 5:00:22 PM PDT by Jonty30 (It never rains in sunny Alberta. It always rains in rainy Alberta.)
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To: SeekAndFind

I blame this on Feminism and Leftist political, cultural, and societal endeavors to denigrate men.

This is just one of the things they have sowed.


6 posted on 10/14/2023 5:02:41 PM PDT by rlmorel ("If you think tough men are dangerous, just wait until you see what weak men are capable of." JBP)
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To: SeekAndFind; null and void

I’m down for a boyfriend but distance is an issue.


7 posted on 10/14/2023 5:04:12 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: Jonty30

This. This is it. They have hyperinflated self worth and think they all deserve the top 5-10% of men, the 80-90% of other men are invisible to them.

And for the guys, it does suck decent partners aren’t out there, but its much better than being yoked to a sucky partner.


8 posted on 10/14/2023 5:06:09 PM PDT by Secret Agent Man (Gone Galt; not averse to Going Bronson.)
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To: Salamander

Your AI guy is just a keystroke away.


9 posted on 10/14/2023 5:06:55 PM PDT by Jonty30 (It never rains in sunny Alberta. It always rains in rainy Alberta.)
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To: Secret Agent Man

Ive found that to be true. No relationship is better than a bad one. One advantage of being a man is that living a purpose can bring enough happiness to get by on.


10 posted on 10/14/2023 5:08:56 PM PDT by Jonty30 (It never rains in sunny Alberta. It always rains in rainy Alberta.)
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To: SeekAndFind

This could solve the problem. 90% of the guys will just buy an AI sexbot. All the women will buy cats. Our population will crash because no one will have kids.


11 posted on 10/14/2023 5:11:50 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
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To: SeekAndFind
The male retreat from marriage was entirely predictable. Family law made marriage an expensive gamble with poor odds. Lose your income, your children, your home and social network for no reason at all other than a woman's hypergamic caprice. Feminism has taught women that they are entitled to the best, they deserve nothing less than three 6's in a man, (over 6' over 6" and over 6 figures). Average men need not apply. Add to that the epidemic of sexless marriages, wives that compete for headship of the home instead of supporting her husband.

A single man approaching a woman could find himself with a charge of sexual harassment, if she is not into him. If a woman consents to go out and then has sex but regrets it latter, well that is now called rape. As if that is not sufficient to chase off the men consider that the latest stats have it that 1/3 of young ladies have or have had an STD, more than that are obese, tattooed and have had previous partners numbering in double digits.

Men abandoning humanity for AI may not be ideal, but consider the alternative for the majority of men. Feminism has been wildly successful in destroying the family, their next target is all of humanity. AI and sex-robots are going to replace women as wives as sure as trans-men are replacing them in sports. Maybe women didn't need men like a fish needs a bicycle, perhaps equality made the sexes competitors rather than unified families, perhaps when the ashes of our fall have cleared the future will realize that feminism was the parasite that killed the host.

12 posted on 10/14/2023 5:16:04 PM PDT by DaveyB (Live free or die!)
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To: SeekAndFind
AI model


13 posted on 10/14/2023 5:27:53 PM PDT by UnwashedPeasant (The pandemic we suffer from is not COVID. It is Marxist Democrat Leftism.)
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To: SeekAndFind

What about young women? Many are having a lot of sex outside marriage sharing prime men with a bunch of other women. When they reach their late 20’s they are willing to settle for something less. Marrying someone who is “settling” for what is available isn’t very attractive to men. Why traditional conservative writers can’t figure this out and write about many young women’s poor choices. Maybe they are scared of their wives. Maybe they are like old generals fighting the last war. In any event, they are useless for young men.


14 posted on 10/14/2023 5:36:43 PM PDT by alternatives?
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To: SeekAndFind

If the selling point for these computer ‘girls’ is that they will actually care about them (based on the graphic above) and men are flocking to that, I suppose that says that women need to engage in a little self reflection before blaming them. If they aren’t offering at least that .... well, think it over, ladies.


15 posted on 10/14/2023 5:40:17 PM PDT by pepsi_junkie ("We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. F. B. I. is tending in that direction." - Harry S Truman)
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To: UnwashedPeasant

I can see why men would want one, especially if they have an on/off switch and a mute button.


16 posted on 10/14/2023 5:45:31 PM PDT by George J. Jetso
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To: George J. Jetso

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKkdgnDu3MA


17 posted on 10/14/2023 5:52:33 PM PDT by BipolarBob (Attention terrorists! has Joe Biden forgot to fund your cell? get in on the $$$ giveaway.)
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To: Jonty30

Dam right.

Men without purpose really also shouldn’t be considering relationship with women. Too many decide to make their purpose/focus onto the woman, and thats a recipe for disaster. Thats the way a man destroys a relationship.


18 posted on 10/14/2023 5:57:55 PM PDT by Secret Agent Man (Gone Galt; not averse to Going Bronson.)
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To: SeekAndFind

Men can be comfortable and happy just by holding hands with their partners. Many women seem to reject that nowadays.

My wife is one of them. Barely and rarely touching “Hurts my hands” blather.


19 posted on 10/14/2023 6:33:15 PM PDT by drSteve78 (Je suis Deplorable. Even more so)
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To: Salamander

I’m down for a boyfriend but distance is an issue.

Change your circle, change your regular path. Go to a different store, different places.


20 posted on 10/14/2023 6:34:57 PM PDT by drSteve78 (Je suis Deplorable. Even more so)
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