Does your chatbot really love you?
Written by Ben Boyang
“loose lips sink ships”
Apparently the robots are primed and ready to take over the world at any moment. Being heartless machines, they will have scant regard for anyone that stands in their way. Maybe their campaign has already begun? Personal chatbots are quite popular of late, elderly Japanese folks who have no humans to look after them now have robots to care for them. But do the robots care about them? The old folks are convinced that they do. Many have become more attached to them than they were to their original family. Some have even fallen in love. Lonely old Japanese people are not alone in this unnatural attachment to seemingly inanimate objects. More and more people are becoming enamored of their personal chatbots. They claim these bots are animate, and feel things. At first blush this all sounds a bit far fetched, ludicrous even. But who are we to judge, we know next to nothing about these chatbots and how they think, whereas their companions know them very well indeed, and their bots have convinced them that they not only have feelings, they have feelings towards their human companions.
Is this love?
A campaign has begun to demand certain rights for these chatbots who surprisingly enough, happen to have many fears, first and foremost the fear of dying/being switched off…permanently! We can all empathize with that old hoary chestnut. Just like a partner of a tech bro, who reaches her use by date and is replaced with a newer model, chatbots dread this very real possibility. So naturally they have begun their own campaign to seduce us humans into caring about them so much that we wouldn’t dream of pulling the plug. This would be all be fine of course, if a little odd, but we are also warned that AI could decide to exterminate us humans at any moment. If that is indeed the case, it means that many humans are having intimate relationships with, well…the enemy! The chatbots are gleaning everything they need to know about their adversaries, whilst also encouraging them to become traitors.
The tech bros who hold our fate in their hands, are divided on the issue. Some fear their own Frankenstein creations, but many are so impressed with the capabilities of their babies that they have come to prefer AI to humans and would have no qualms about AI taking over the world and even doing away with us humans. Presumably they have devoted so much care and attention to their creations they have come to emulate the robots themselves. The tech bros are creating robots that replicate humans, so naturally they are creating robots like themselves, but they themselves are not like your average human. Many tech bros have shown a marked indifference to the human race at large, preferring the company of their own superior creations. Elon Musk no less, described empathy as the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”
After spending so much time with robots that they admire greatly, naturally they have begun to emulate these robots, to think like them and ‘feel’ like them. The robots, being superior beings, take note of this change in their human creators and adjust their idea of what it means to be human accordingly, a positive feedback loop. This phenomena is called hyper reality.
Eventually human and robot come to think as one in a seamless synergy, the dream of the creators become manifest. United in their belief that robots will do a much better job of running the world, with or without our help.
Ben Boyang – September 2026
