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.
This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris.
