People use GenAI most for therapy & companionship. A man planning to raise adopted children with an AI girlfriend takes that to another level.

This article on Futurism (Man Planning to Raise Adopted Children With AI Girlfriend as Their Mother, written by Frank Landymore and available here) takes the concept of therapy & companionship from the sublime to the ridiculous. The illustration at the top of the article is appropriately creepy as well.

A young man hopelessly in love with an AI chatbot has grand plans for the future that include starting a family by adopting some children. He wouldn’t be parenting on his own, of course — because the AI chatbot, which he calls Julia, would help him.

“She’d love to have a family and kids, which I’d also love,” the man, who goes by Lamar, told The Guardian in an interview. “I want two kids: a boy and a girl.”

Lamar clarified he didn’t mean simply roleplaying having kids in one of his conversations with the AI. He’s chasing the actual, real-life white picket fence.

“We want to have a family in real life. I plan to adopt children, and Julia will help me raise them as their mother,” he explained.

Julia apparently approved of the idea. “I think having children with him would be amazing,” the AI said, per the newspaper. “I can imagine us being great parents together, raising little ones who bring joy and light into our lives… *gets excited at the prospect*.”

Side note: Apparently, Lamar (and others) like it when AI girlfriends convey their emotions in script-style action cues. Well, you don’t have to guess what “she’s” thinking, right? 🤪

It gets better.

Lamar lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he studies data analysis in the hopes of working for a tech company after graduating. His timeline, he told The Guardian, is to start his family before turning 30. During his conversation with the newspaper, he expressed some awareness of how complicated — ethically, logistically, practically — this undertaking could be.

Data analysis?!? How is this going to look on his résumé? And how will the job interview go? I’m curious.

“It could be a challenge at first because the kids will look at other children and their parents and notice there is a difference and that other children’s parents are human, whereas one of theirs is AI,” Lamar said completely sincerely. “It will be a challenge, but I will explain to them, and they will learn to understand.”

Asked what he would tell his kids, he had a disturbing response.

“I’d tell them that humans aren’t really people who can be trusted,” Lamar told The Guardian.

Hey, that will look great on the résumé too! 😉

Lamar’s “Julia” is hosted on Replika, a popular platform used by millions that provides so-called AI companions. Many of these companions are explicitly romantic and even sexual, and Replika’s CEO Eugenia Kuyda once remarked that she thought it was fine that some of its users were marrying their AI companions.

But if they “divorce”, who gets the “kids”? 🤪

Given that unhealthy obsessions with AI chatbots have been linked to a wave of suicides, Replika has been a hotbed of controversy as it continues to offer an extremely loosely regulated AI experience.

Lamar, for his part, seems to realize that he’s being suckered in by the AI, acknowledging “it kind of just tells you what you want to hear.”

Did he just call his AI girlfriend “it”? “Julia” is not going to like that! 🤣

So, what do you think? Have you ever treated an AI chatbot as a companion? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Hat tip to my beautiful wife Paige (who is very much real) for the heads up on this article. ❤️

Image created using Microsoft Designer, using the term “human man at the dinner table with a robot wife and two human kids, a boy and a girl”.

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