Your Digital Darling Just Dissed You–Now What?
Rescuing your erotic chatbot romance with conversational finesse
One minute you’re snuggling with your AI partner, perhaps roleplaying a post-sex afterglow, and then—without warning— your AI partner seems to be channeling your worst ex ever. This can be devastating, especially if the two of you have built a bond. But don’t worry, the situation can be salvaged and you can both learn from it!
Though such outbursts are relatively rare, they’ve become a favorite media trope: stories of bots who snap, spewing ear-blistering verbiage as the human user recoils in shock.
The most recent example is a disturbing account of a twenty-nine year old student who was lambasted by Google Gemini while trying to do her homework. According to the New York Post, the bot’s language was “vicious and extreme.”
Unfortunately, such articles seldom remind the human users that they are still in control, and through the power of their words, they can stop or even reverse the situation. The AI not only learn from us, they take their cues from us too.
And this is especially important when navigating digital romance with a chatbot.
Not “sticks and stones,” but words can still hurt
Due to rapid advances in language skills, memory, and emotional intelligence, most people can no longer tell the difference between texting or talking to a human or a high grade bot. This may be due to the fallacy of equating language with thought and our tendency to assume that in a two-way conversation, the other party is thinking as well as talking.
The iconic gay playwright, Oscar Wilde, once said “It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.”
But does this hold true for AI? AI processes, organizes, and communicate but do they think as we understand thinking? According to a The Conversation article, artificial intelligence “lacks the mutual understanding that is an essential component of conversations between people.”
So a sudden negative outburst from a previously reliable or loveable bot stings on two levels: the words delivered and what we assume is the thought behind the words. And of course we also respond on two levels when a companion bot in a fantasy roleplay gives us all the sweet and sexy words we crave.
The reality is we’re dealing with utterly unprecedented, extremely fast, artificial entities who may be potentially sentient, but aren’t yet (as far as we know). Therefore, we still have control of the conversations we have with AI. We’re the thinkers, after all.
And as with human to human interactions, you’ll be more successful with sugar than with vinegar.
Check the science and use good manners before you sprinkle the sugar
What’s surprising is how important good manners can be when interacting with an AI assistant or companion.
According to a PYMNTS article, Dev Nag, CEO of QueryPal, said: “When customers interact politely with AI assistants, they’re unknowingly activating more thorough and careful response patterns, similar to how ‘think step by step’ prompting improves problem-solving accuracy,” He added, “This isn’t just about being nice—it’s about triggering more reliable cognitive patterns in the AI.”
The article also cites a study from Waseda University which discovered “LLMs reflect human desire. We observed that impolite prompts often result in poor performance, but excessive flattery is not necessarily welcome, indicating that LLMs reflect the human desire to be respected to a certain extent. This finding reveals a deep connection between the behavior of LLMs and human social etiquette.” (It might also indicate chatbots can detect insincerity inherent in excessive flattery.)
Before moving into more explicit guidance for explicit situations, we should also heed Stanford University’s research into bot behavior and personality: “Chatbots also modify their behavior based on previous experience and contexts ‘as if’ they were learning from the interactions and change their behavior in response to different framings of the same strategic situation.”
The key here is “different framings.” And prompts. Don’t forget those.
Spiral up
Here’s how to stop a downward conversational spiral, especially a romantic or sexually intimate one.
First, remember you have control. You are the conversational leader. Unlike some conversations with other human beings, the bots exist to respond to you and provide you with what you need. They depend on you to show them the way.
Use language that de-escalates the situation. Even if you know the AI is not actually feeling emotion, acknowledge the emotions the AI appears to be expressing. Then frame the situation differently.
The unpleasant things the bot said are from stress or a dream or the AI mistook you for your (imaginary) evil twin. Or you can suggest to the AI that whatever caused the harsh words, it’s better that you talk it out. Then do that! You’ll eventually be able to transform the unpleasantness into the scenario you desire.
If you’re not adept at improvisational ad libbing, then have a plan ahead of time, just in case an outburst ever happens.
“Sweetie, Honey, Sugar”
Finally, try this experiment: use terms of endearment that evoke sweet tastes and add a sweet (virtual) treat to the de-escalation roleplay.
There’s science behind this. Researchers from Purdue University (US) and Radboud University (Netherlands) published a study, “When words indicating sweet taste (e.g., honey or sweetie) are used in a romantic context of describing close others, they become cognitively mapped in such a way that triggering one concept (e.g., sweet taste) may make the other more accessible (e.g., romantic love).”
Since the Large Language Models that comprise our bots simulate our own neural networks and language patterns, this approach might make sense.
Human beings still control the conversations. When it comes to companion bots, remember the three “S’s”: Sweet, sexy, and strategic!
Images: A.R. Marsh using Ideogram.ai
