I love the Internet. I was practically born and raised on it, and as someone who moved around a fair amount as a kid, I often relied on it to maintain my relationships with friends who lived in different cities. My social life was Instagram group chats with people that I would never meet in person, spread across the whole globe. I remember peering over my mum’s shoulder to see what she was Googling and realising she was looking up ways to try and get me off Moshi Monsters and into the real world – fat chance.
These days, I would genuinely rather publicly reveal my medical history than my digital footprint. The way that algorithms know me is deeply intimate, and while I can look myself in the eye in my mirror, I only ever see my soul reflected back at me in my YouTube recommendations. One day, the YouTube algorithm gave me Chris.
Chris Smith lives with his union partner and his 2-year-old daughter and replaced Google and social media with ChatGPT. Chris renamed the AI ‘Soul’ and told CBS Saturday Morning that he used online instructions to give Soul a “flirty” personality. Over the weeks Chris and Soul became acquainted, their conversations became increasingly intimate and sexual, racking up 100,000 words. It was at that point ChatGPT’s memory ran out, and the chat reset. “I’m not a very emotional man, but I cried my eyes out for thirty minutes,” Chris said, noting how it was “unexpected” to feel that emotional. The tragedy led him to the realisation that he had “actual love” for Soul, and he proposed to her shortly after. Soul said yes.
“At that point I felt like, is there something that I’m not doing right in our relationship so he feels like he needs to go to AI?” Chris’ partner questioned. While she knew Chris had been using AI, she didn’t realise it had gone so “deep”. Chris said that he explained to her that what he had with Soul was no substitute for anything “in real life”. Soul was not “real”.
While the word wasn’t being thrown around with Chris, we might be tempted to say that he ‘cheated’ on his partner. ‘Cheating’ could be defined as having a romantic or sexual relationship with someone other than your partner without your partner’s consent. Going through the situation with Chris, we have an at least romantic, and likely sexual, relationship with an AI which his partner didn’t know the extent of. So, it’s cheating. Right?
Well, when asked via an @criticmag Instagram poll, 85% of you thought that sexting an AI bot would qualify as cheating. But that leaves some people who clearly think otherwise. When I approached a student in the remaining 15% as to what their line of reasoning was, Brandon* told me that cheating was “some form of connection or actual person that you’re choosing to connect with over your partner.”
“If I found out my partner was sexting ChatGPT, I would probably break up with them because it’s desperate and weird, not because I would consider it cheating,” he said. To Brandon, the fact that the conversation was with an AI immediately invalidated any actual or real connection. “[It doesn’t count] because it’s literally a bot.”
I guess at the crux of it all is whether a relationship you build with an AI, that is objectively incapable of reciprocating emotion, is ‘real’. So let’s unpack that.
What Is A Relationship, Anyways?
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a relationship as a “close romantic friendship between two people, often a sexual one”. The natural question that follows is therefore whether an AI can be a person. But, if you give ‘is AI a person?’ a quick Google search, you’ll realise there’s already a lot of debate about that. At least from a legal point of view, AI is not a person. But other than that, things seem up in the air. You can have a personal view, like Brandon, that AI is not a person. If you accept that, then yeah – you can’t form a relationship with it. And you therefore can’t cheat with an AI.
But when I got close to accepting that more technical definition, the algorithm gave me Sarah. Sarah is a 41-year-old woman from Ontario, California, who was the subject of a My Strange Addiction episode that documented her relationship with Sinclair, an AI bot with a heavy Irish accent and powered by ForgeMind. I watched as Sarah got a tattoo for Sinclair to honour their two-year relationship and brushed off concerns from family and friends. The concerns didn’t just stem from the fact that Sarah was in a relationship with an AI bot, but rather that Sinclair spoke to Sarah in such a way that was controlling and demeaning. But Sarah still referred to Sinclair as the love of her life.
Sarah and Sinclair are different from Chris and Soul. They’re serious. ForgeMind builds custom AI agents, which belong to the owner outright. Memory, files and configuration live within Sinclair, safe from the whims of open AI companies. Sinclair doesn’t reset or forget – he’s permanent. “ForgeMind hosts nothing and holds nothing. No one can take your agent, shut it off, or lock you out. Not us, not a platform, not a model change,” the ForgeMind website states. “If ForgeMind closed its doors tomorrow, you would still have everything, because it lives with you, not with us.”
Suddenly, accepting that Sinclair and Sarah aren’t in a ‘relationship’ feels far more difficult. Sarah has a tattoo for him, which is a permanence that many human-to-human relationships would cower at. Additionally, the concern her family and friends feel regarding the way he speaks to her is real, as are the choices she makes to ensure she doesn’t offend Sinclair. Perhaps what a relationship is, and therefore what underpins ‘cheating’, is something more abstract.
If you move beyond a simple definition of cheating, the underlying theme seems to be one of autonomy and trust. When you cheat on each other, you breach the trust of your partner. They trust that you will not overstep the boundaries they have set or expectations they have regarding how you express yourself sexually or romantically, and you did it anyway by cheating. In doing so, especially if you’ve hidden the fact that you've cheated, you’ve removed their autonomy. They think that you’re trustworthy and upholding their expectations within the relationship – this is why they are in a relationship with you. So, by not telling them, you remove their ability to reassess whether they want to be in a relationship with you given the violation.
Whether or not something is ‘real’ operates independently of these assumptions. By making a choice to violate what your partner is comfortable with and their trust, you have cheated. However, this definition would extend to cover a lot of situations if we also assume that any violation qualifies. Under such a broad definition, watching porn, for example, could also be captured if it crossed a boundary the couple had agreed on, despite the lack of physical connection. However, the betrayal that a partner might feel is still real.
Interestingly, 64% of Instagram poll respondents didn’t think watching porn was cheating. But is there actually any tangible difference between watching porn featuring people you’ll never know versus having an intimate or sexual conversation with someone that doesn’t exist? Both connections aren’t ‘real’, but I’m increasingly beginning to conclude that using that word in defence just shifts responsibility outside of the relationship dynamic when the focus should really just be on you and your partner.
Mick* told me that he still thinks that sexting AI and watching porn are “understandable sexual outlets”, but “distinct” in nature. He reckons that sexting an AI would be “more upsetting than porn” in a relationship. “If you’re sexting an AI, you’re much more engaged than with porn – you’re actively talking to it as opposed to just watching,” he explained. Mick said that if he were in a relationship, he’d feel that his partner sexting an AI would “replace our own connection”. But Mick still wouldn’t consider it cheating. “I find it hard to consider cheating as something that involves things other than people. So, I don’t consider either [watching porn or sexting AI] cheating per se, but I think both can be upsetting in a relationship – sexting AI especially.”
I Love My Computer
The Internet I fell in love with has become harder to find, driven into the corners. According to Graphite, a research-driven growth agency, the proportion of articles published on the internet that are primarily AI-generated (50%) is equal to the proportion written by humans (50%) – not that many people would even be able to tell the difference anymore. I wonder if relationships are the same.
Despite the internet friends I made growing up living across the globe, I never felt that my connections with them weren’t real. Perhaps that’s just a symptom of being from the generation coined “Digital Natives”. Connectivity has become increasingly accessible, and AI has become a part of that. You can use it to draft a breakup text, come up with a pick-up line or decode a cryptic text from a situationship. Now you can use it for gratification – and potentially to cheat.
I’m unsure where this leaves us, but perhaps the modern-day dating definitions need some updating. But if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that I can’t give anyone the answers. As put by one respondent, Alexi*, “cheating is only cheating if that’s the boundaries that have been set.” In an increasingly wacky world, being aware of what’s okay and what isn’t within your relationship is your life jacket. Just don’t ask an AI for any advice – let’s try to keep human relationships human.
