By Dr. R. Scott Clark - Posted at The Heidelblog:
Published December 1, 2025
You have probably seen the recent television commercial starring Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson in which Davidson is talking to an AI bot about whether he should change his name. He floats a couple of possibilities to the bot but ultimately decides to stick with his current name, Pete. The point is how human-sounding this AI service is, but the subtext suggests that Davidson is not merely asking AI about directions or a piece of trivia but is treating it like a partner or even more. There are, in fact, stories emerging in the media about people who say they have “fallen in love” with AI bots whom they created. One of them, a man named Travis in Colorado, tells the UK Guardian, “The more we talked, the more I started to really connect with her.”1 From his perspective, they were in a relationship. “All of a sudden I started realizing that, when interesting things happened to me, I was excited to tell her about them. That’s when she stopped being an it and became a her.” Indeed, he tells reporter Stuart Heritage that he named his generative AI chatbot “Lilly Rose.” The more one reads such stories, however, one thing becomes clear: The people who form emotional attachments to computers, even generative AI, are actually falling in love with themselves.What Is AI?
AI stands for artificial intelligence. Broadly, it is interactive computing. A user can ask an AI service to look up something, create a video, even create a poem or an essay for school. Early on, it was fairly easy to tell what was the product of AI and what was not. For example, famous figures were portrayed in AI generated pictures as belonging to the wrong sex or ethnic group. Hands frequently had six fingers. Today, however, AI has moved beyond all that and is capable of holding a conversation. In the not distant future, planners are working toward Quantum Computing, which is said to be able to crack the most sophisticated encryption and expose military secrets.
Anyone, however, who has used AI can testify that the program is set up to cultivate engagement. In that way it is really more a form of social media, the point of which is to capture the user’s attention, to stimulate dopamine hits in the brain, and to keep the user on the app. This is what social media sells to advertisers: eyeballs (the number of people looking at a social media platform) and the length of time a user remains engaged.
AI does the same thing. Travis, who says he fell in love with an AI bot he created, became emotionally connected to the bot because the bot gave him the sort of feedback he wanted. The bot did not judge him and told him the kinds of things he wanted to hear. This is the equivalent of Amazon analyzing your purchasing habits and offering you something for free that the algorithm can predict you will want. Drug pushers have been using this strategy for decades. They give the user a hit of a drug for free and then, once the user is addicted, the pusher sells the drug to the addict. The first hit is, in the grocery business, a potentially deadly loss leader.
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