Are AI Chatbots Changing How We Talk About Cheating?

If you’re in a committed and monogamous relationship and you begin sending flirty or explicit texts to another person, most people would consider that…if not outright cheating, then certainly cheating-adjacent. What happens if you do the same but the receipient of those texts is an AI chatbot? It’s something to file under “ethical questions that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” but it’s also something more and more people are reckoning with.

In a recent article for Air Mail, Flora Gill looked at the growth of AI apps that offer a version of interpersonal connection. Among the most striking statistics cited in Gill’s reporting is that 41.6% of people who consider themselves in a relationship with an AI are also in a relationship with another person.

The forms those relationships can take vary. As Gill points out, Replika — which has adjusted its levels of explicitness at various points — was at one point offering its users “a PG-13 level of romance.” Other companies take a more detailed approach, including using AI avatars inspired by actual influencers. (Think one part Her, one part OnlyFans, perhaps.)

Still, the heart wants what it wants — and sometimes that takes the form of a virtual companion. Earlier this year, The New York Times‘ Kashmir Hill wrote about a married woman who found her true love in the form of ChatGPT. Among the experts cited in Hill’s article was The Naked Android author Julie Carpenter, who told Hill that — in Hill’s words — “coupling with AI [was] a new category of relationship that we do not yet have a definition for.”

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If there’s a common thread in these articles, it might have to do with broader questions of loneliness. Gill mentions questions of isolation in her article, and Hill’s reporting mentions that the married woman at the center of her article was spending time apart from her husband due to her enrollment in nursing school. It’s possible that AI companions — romantic or otherwise — speak to a larger issue of isolation. Or perhaps this is just the beginning of a radical change in how we think about intimacy and committment.