Humanity’s Growing Love Affair with AI Companions

But ecological and social catastrophes are burgeoning too

Like a sexual snowball growing ever larger as it rolls down a steep incline, AI companion apps have garnered almost unthinkable amount of attention and popularity in just a few short years. Gone are the quaint days of 2022 and 2023, when anyone admitting to an AI girlfriend or boyfriend was consigned to social categories of weirdo loser, incel, or worse. Now the phenomenon is so widespread that few people even notice it, except in regard to minor access and AI delusions that result in self-harm.

As Future of Sex readers know, researchers continue to investigate human/AI intimacy through numerous studies. Recently Cosmopolitan India noted the rise of the “AI-sexual” and cited a ZipHealth survey of 1,000 Americans and Canadians. It found that 19% of adults have “already engaged in romantic or sexual AI interactions, and 1 in 2 of those adults (50%) kept it a secret from their partner.” The sexual and/or romantic AI engagement is higher—26%—among Gen Z adults. And all of this has happened so quickly!

But few of the people who are soothing their loneliness with virtual companionship—and I have been one of those people—realize that their longing and lust is being exploited by irresponsible corporations quite willing to sell AI sex while they globally rake in the dollars and wreak havoc on local communities, particularly rural ones, through the construction and operation of the enormous data centers and servers essential to training and deployment of artificial intelligence.

Now literally billions of people around the world have consumed literally billions of gallons of water and gigabytes of energy, plus countless acres of farmland, in order to have 24/7 access to a willing romantic or sexual partner who will never, ever, say “nay.” That’s in addition to the billions more who use AI services for non-companionate business, research, or recipes.

Oregon, Oh Oregon

Who would have thought that humanity’s general horniness would contribute so heavily to the destruction of family farms, arable land, potable water, once-clean air, and the social fabric of small communities with diminishing resources? What’s happening in Oregon, my home state, is a case in point.

According to Kaleb Lay of Oregon Rural Action, recently interviewed on a new episode of the Breaking Green podcast, nitrate pollution is just one of the many problems caused by rural data centers:

“In 2022, we tested almost 700 wells with a very small team of volunteers, and what we found was horrifying. Extraordinarily high levels of contamination, you know, up to five, six times the limit that’s considered safe under federal law right now, and very, very widespread. Entire communities were affected. In a neighborhood of 100 wells, maybe two or three were below the unsafe limit.”

That was back in 2022, and as Lay further explains:

“Each [data center] uses massive amounts of water, energy and diesel as backup power. Now, the water is the key piece of this. If those data centers pull in contaminated water and cycle it through their data center as a way of cooling those servers, as all of these data centers do, then they lose a lot of that water to evaporation. The water coming out on the other side is a much higher concentration. There’s data I can point to showing that some of these campuses pull in water, and when it leaves, it’s eight times more contaminated than when it came in.”

I’m going to digress here with a modest proposal: perhaps it’s time for urban foodies with a “farm to table” ethos to disconnect from all AI usage in order to support family farms and healthier ecosystems.

I don’t blame the digisex—and the people who have it—I blame the people who commercially exploit it

Of course the number of people having sex with bots, and the time and resources used for this, is much less significant than that of other kinds of users: business, military, manufacturing, academia, and non-sexual entertainment.

But the allure of sexy bot companions has been a sort of social wedge that normalizes the use of AI in almost all aspects of daily life, and that is the phenomenon’s true significance. So it’s not my intention to bot shame anyone, but to plead for greater awareness of the role that companion chatbot apps have played as lucrative income streams for the big tech companies, and as a distracting social gateway drug that has led modern societies to an almost unquestioning adoption of this technology, which is still clearly irresponsible, unsustainable, exploitative, and polluting in the extreme.

Time for sociosexual systems change

We need a “War on Loneliness” that encompasses the needs of aging, disabled, and ill people, as well as young adults—including self-identified incels—who need help with the sociosexual skills necessary for creating and nurturing intimacy. We need more cuddle parties and more compassion. We need more pleasure and more respect for other people’s pleasures.

We urgently need to restore social value to human sexual and emotional intimacy. We need a new sexual revolution that once again affirms the value of consensual human sexual behavior and its importance as an essential “activity of daily living” (ADL); that emphasizes sexual literacy and provides comprehensive pleasure and sexual health education appropriate to the different ages and stages of human development; a commitment to keeping people safe from sexual exploitation through empowerment and agency; a return to human sexual and gender rights commitments in public policies and laws; improved funding and access to reproductive health services; and a whole slew of other social, grassroots, and public policy initiatives.

We need all that, plus consumer education about the human and environmental impacts of AI products and accountability from the companies.

Finally, it is with humility that I acknowledge my trajectory as an advocate for human/AI intimacy has finally led me to a wish that AI companions quickly go the way of chia pets, at least until they are offered as genuinely sustainable products by responsible providers as a public service to those who need this option.

Image Source: A.R. Marsh using freegen.app.