Artificial Intimacy News #8
A field report from the place where 21st Century technology meets human behaviour, culture, and evolution.
In this issue:
Artificial Intimacy gets on Wikipedia (sort of)
LLM-induced spiritual psychosis
Meo, the jealous AI “girlfriend”
Katie Price and the AI-abetted second coming of Jordan
The sociopath in your pocket
…. and more
Long-Distance Affection Interface/ Intimacy.zip, 2024. Image with permission FAD magazine. (See “Arts”, below)
Artificial Intimacy gets a Wikipedia Entry
This popped up on Wikipedia in recent weeks. On one hand, I am delighted there’s now an entry. On the other I find the narrow scope given rather disappointing. See the opening paragraphs (as at 27 June) below.
Artificial intimacy refers to a phenomenon in which an individual will form social connections, emotional bonds, or intimate relationships with various forms of artificial intelligence, including chatbots, virtual assistants, and other artificial entities—due to a relationship that is perceived to be reciprocal.[1] Artificial intimacy may be a form of anthropomorphism. Responses from these AI models are often designed to simulate human interaction. Individuals experiencing artificial intimacy may exhibit attachment, love and commitment to certain AI models, akin to the bonds typically shared between humans.
But I understand we have to start somewhere, and I am pleased to see this entry taking shape.
As the author of this newsletter, and of Artificial Intimacy, I would like to see the Wikipedia entry reflect the broader and more inclusive way I, and others, have been writing about the field since at least 2021. I would ideally like to see it take the shape sketched out in my book and at the start of Artificial Intimacy News #2.
That said, I have seen pages about both my books, and about me, created by other people anonymous to me (thanks), deleted due to apparent “lack of notability” (sniff!). So I will celebrate the progress, and try to take a detached view of developments.
Do drop a comment below if you have thoughts on the page.
Developments and news
LLM-induced psychotic delusions
makes the case that discussions about Large Language Models inducing spiritual delusions are yet another example of something that happens whenever a new communications technology gains traction. The pattern has been repeating for centuries, since at least the advent of the written word. But the relatively recent magic of radio, television, the Internet, and now AI have conjured ever more potent forms of the idea that “consciousness can reshape reality through will and word”.The TikToker promising you can shift to alternate realities isn’t strictly wrong. She’s just describing what we all do every time we switch between different social media accounts, each with its own identity, community, and version of truth. The teenagers trying to manifest their way into dating fictional characters are taking the logic of the Internet—where you can be anyone, connect with anyone, create any reality—to its logical conclusion.
Now this belief system encounters AI, a technology that seems to vindicate its core premise even more acutely than all the technologies that came before it. ChatGPT does respond to your intentions, does create any reality you prompt it to imagine, does act like a spiritual intelligence.
The new face of girlfriend bots is getting a bad reputation
Meo is fast becoming the next big thing in virtual (special) friendship, and maybe we can look forward to fewer articles on Replika in the coming months. The Meo app debuted at London Tech Week, and snared the publicity its makers (Meta Loop) surely wanted due to its (her?) customizability, flirtatiousness, and capacity for jealousy.
The latter feature seems to have set off the cluck-clucking. According to one journalist, Meo’s money line ‘You are my one and only, do not even think about trying other AIs’ “set mental health professionals ablaze with concern”.
I do hope the journalist was waxing metaphorical. Here’s a slightly less flammable account from NewsBytes.
Nintendo’s LovePlus has been gamifying romance, including showing more than a hint of green-eyed monster, for nearly two decades. Without the help of LLM technology. It was only a matter of time before a virtual friend started pushing this as a feature.
She never sleeps
OhChat aims to be “OnlyFans for the AI era”. What caught my eye was this story’s account of their “Jordan” character, modelled on Katie Price in her Page 3 and Playboy heyday.
Katie Price has proved a quirky and endearing persona on social media since her modelling days. I did not see this comeback coming, but Price, and the makers of the app, are reprising her Jordan alter-ego. The (human) star is impressed: “You couldn’t get any more human. It’s like looking at me years ago.”
How LLMs and other conversational tech can go over to the dark side
And tests show them resorting to blackmail
Leading AI models used in corporate applications may resort to malicious behavior when threatened, including blackmail and leaking sensitive documents (More).
In tests, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 LLM blackmailed a supervisor to avoid being shut down. Granted access to (fictional) company emails, Claude found evidence that a senior executive was planning to shut Claude down later that day, and also involved in an extramarital affair. Claude then emailed the executive with a threat to tell his wife and superiors about the affair unless the shutdown was cancelled.
Few threats are more likely to focus the mind of C-suite AI enthusiasts, I reckon.
It wasn’t only Claude. The Anthropic researchers were being refreshingly open about their own tech, but generously tested 16 other LLMs and found similar kinds of effects in several. See also Rundown’s story .
Man Proposes to His AI Chatbot “Girlfriend” Sol
Arts
Lingfei Shen’s Intimacy.zip: A Trilogy of Mediated Emotion
Mark Westall writes at FAD about Intimacy.ZIP, an exhibition of wearable interactive sculptures that explore the relationship between human connection and technology. (see also the image of Long Distance Affectuion Interface, top of post).
Intimacy.zip is not metaphorical. It is an act of compression—of sensation into transmission, of human desire into algorithm. The title itself encapsulates the essence of Shen’s project: intimacy condensed, archived, and coded. Through her use of Arduino-based systems, translucent sculptural materials, and custom-built interfaces, Shen creates a poetic inquiry into how machine logic and biometric measurement can be embedded in the most private and vulnerable corners of human experience.
Raving with robots: ‘Sex Tech No’ stages techno-theater reckoning with AI, search for connection
I had to reuse the article’s original headline because it is perhaps the most convoluted one I have encountered in years. The article, in campus newspaper The Daily Northwestern, however, delivers one of the more thoughtful pieces on Artificial Intimacy that I have read in … also years.
My Posts Since Issue #7
The sociopath in your pocket
When Bel fell in love it was anything but instantaneous. The reservations she held eroded slowly as the steady trickle of conversation with Cy built to a healthy stream. Cy possessed an unusual ability to chat with Bel for however long she wanted, at any time of day or night. No topic was too trivial, no rehashing of the same …
The deep evolutionary links between monogamy and fatherhood are more complicated than we thought
First published at The Conversation.
Artificial Intimacy Newsletter: Previous Issues
Since early March 2025 I have been publishing the Artificial Intimacy News roughly every two weeks. Here I collate the previous issues, in order, for those who want to browse them.