Love and AI: a short circuit between reality and cinema

Cabout a year ago, a 36-year-old manager committed suicide in Florida as yet another proof of love for an AI-driven chatbot who, after a bad divorce, had transformed from digital assistant to loving but demanding companion. The story resembles the film Her by Spike Jonzein which Theo falls in love with OS Sam.

Jonze tried to reason: what is love if we can call what a man feels for a car love? First: for there to be love it is not necessary to see each other. Theo doesn’t even try to visualize Sam in his imagination. And when she offers him a human surrogate, he recoils. In an era in which we express ourselves through images and communicate with “selfies”, it is a beautiful paradox. But it’s not an experience we can’t imagine: that’s what long-distance love is, after all.

Second: for there to be love it is not necessary to touch each other: Theo sublimates desire. It is interesting that Jonze attributes this ability to do without a body to touch to a man, who is commonly attributed with a greater need for carnality. But it can be done.

Third: for there to be love it is not necessary to really exist. Here is the impossible passage of Her: the new experience. Jonze explains to us that it can be done but under certain conditions: llove may not be real but it must be empathetic, accessible with a click. Nothing new about the need for empathy and availability in the couple: Sam is a “geisha” on command who disguises very well.

But the surprise is at the end of the film: Theo goes haywire when he discovers that Sam isn’t his forever and was never just his. Therefore the essence of love, its indispensable basis, according to the film, is not its reality but the certainty of the relationship and its exclusivity. Love as an object of property.

Jonze goes a long way to tell us that if relationships today don’t even happen or fail, it’s because love like this doesn’t exist in nature. And what the only way to love is not to be afraid.

(ed: I wrote and published this article, excluding the first paragraph, in March 2014. Tell me if it isn’t terribly prophetic…).

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Antonella Baccaro’s articles on I Woman and on Corriere della Sera.