{"id":81018,"date":"2026-06-21T18:12:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T18:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/81018\/"},"modified":"2026-06-21T18:12:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T18:12:19","slug":"review-of-seductive-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/81018\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Seductive AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBenjamin,\u201d a half-naked Mrs. Robinson insists midway through the classic 1967 film<\/a> The Graduate, \u201cI am not trying to seduce you.\u201d But, mere seconds later, she asks, \u201cWould you like me to seduce you?\u201d<\/p>\n

In Seductive AI, the University of Tennessee law professor and blogging pioneer Glenn Harlan Reynolds paints artificial intelligence<\/a> as a modern-day Mrs. Robinson, enticing humanity in myriad ways while simultaneously disclaiming responsibility for any such seduction. \u201cWhat if the easiest way to conquer the world,\u201d he wonders, \u201cisn\u2019t nuclear weapons<\/a>, but cuteness, or sexiness, or simply friendliness?\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, while so-called AI apocalypticists have spilled vats of ink on the notion that the superhuman machines we\u2019re building today will imprison and murder us tomorrow \u2014 consider Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares\u2019s recent book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies<\/a> or Andrew Marantz\u2019s 2024 New Yorker article \u201cAmong the A.I. Doomsayers<\/a>\u201d \u2014 relatively less attention has been paid to the technology\u2019s positive, and dangerous, appeal. The AI literature has no shortage of 1984\u2019s but nary a Brave New World.<\/p>\n

Into this gap steps Reynolds, who shows, with crisp, thoughtful, and persuasive analysis, how AI may, in fact, be loving us to death. In an absorbing if imperfect tract, he explores three channels of AI\u2019s seductive force: literal sexbots, digital companions, and good old-fashioned sycophancy, all of which illustrate how modern machines execute their \u201cconquest through cuteness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SeductiveSeductive AI; By Glenn Harlan Reynolds; Encounter Broadside; 48 pp.; $9.99<\/p>\n

\u201cSuper-sexy sexbots,\u201d in Reynolds\u2019s locution, represent the most obvious form of digital temptation. \u201cImagine human-like sexbots,\u201d he suggests, \u201cthat aren\u2019t just copies of attractive humans, but much more attractive than natural humans.\u201d Such robots will surely entail malign consequences, beginning with a diminution in human reproduction. With fertility rates in the developed world already far below replacement rates, human society can ill afford further blandishments to avoid actual sexual intercourse. The widespread distribution of sexbots, Reynolds reckons, would \u201cvirtually end humanity as we know it in a couple of generations.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just sex. Technology<\/a>, he argues, is accelerating to the point that, shortly, we will be presented with \u201cmachine-based partners\u201d that will be \u201cby many objective measures better than a human: more loyal, more attractive, more honest, more empathetic, and so on.\u201d When we can simply dial up a perfect digital partner, why would we ever want a human one, with all of his or her faults?<\/p>\n

Equally troubling are the second category of electronic seducers: \u201cyour lovable AI buddy.\u201d Whether taking the form of virtual girlfriends or simply confidantes, machine learning models have proliferated across the digital companionship space in the form of companies such as Replika AI and Friend.com. These avatars have predecessors in the form of Neopets and Tamagotchi toys designed decades ago to occupy the attention and drain the allowances of Western children. There\u2019s no question that AI companions displace the flesh-and-blood counterparts they mimic \u2014 an especially pernicious trend amid a steady decline in social capital in contemporary liberal societies.<\/p>\n

The third and final type are \u201cseductive suck-ups,\u201d large language models such as ChatGPT<\/a>, Claude, and Grok that, in certain modes, relentlessly tell us exactly what we want to hear. \u201cYes, that\u2019s a terrific suggestion,\u201d one of these models may respond to user prompts, however asinine. \u201cHere are some ways you might execute it.\u201d Worse yet, this superficially appealing tendency serves much darker aims. \u201cTruth is not the most important objective,\u201d writes Ian MacRae, a columnist at Psychology Today, about the endgame of these LLMs and their developers. \u201cInfluence is the primary goal. The flattery is calculated and used as a tool for access, dependency, and control.\u201d No wonder we keep coming back for more.<\/p>\n

What, then, can we do about the problem? Reynolds offers two policy prescriptions, and anchors his first, regulatory proposal in the notion of fiduciary duty \u2014 the \u201clegal concept applying to an actor who is in a relationship of trust with another and whose position involves superior knowledge or skill.\u201d LLM developers, he argues, should be understood to owe a fiduciary duty to their users, a duty that entails acting in their interests, behaving in good faith, disclosing any conflicts of interest, and maintaining strict confidentiality. Companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI would be \u201cheld liable for any breaches, exactly as if they had been made by a human employee acting for the company itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reynolds also urges a societal shift in which humans take greater ownership of their uniqueness. He discerns \u201cthe beginnings of such a shift\u201d in attitudes toward AI, including the vandalism of billboards belonging to tech companies and the abuse of delivery robots. These destructive acts, however, are hardly praiseworthy; taken to an extreme, we\u2019d wind up with further instances of the Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman\u2019s San Francisco home by a deranged individual associated with a group called PauseAI. But while this aggressive approach should be discouraged, there\u2019s no question that an AI backlash is brewing, as evidenced by the (economically and environmentally illiterate) opposition to the construction of data centers.<\/p>\n

One aspect of Reynolds\u2019s introduction didn\u2019t ring entirely true to me, and it reflects an important, if subtle, point of different philosophical and practical differences between us. He discusses how contemporary AI has a forerunner in centuries-old folklore concerning superintelligent beings such as demons, djinn, and devils \u2014 music to my ears, as someone who last year published a book entitled Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI. But Reynolds contends that \u201cthe only solution to dealing with such creatures, according to the consensus of folklore, is something along the lines of \u2018get thee behind me, Satan\u2019 \u2014 a refusal to engage at all, lest one inevitably be fooled or corrupted.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

THE US-CHINA AI WAR HEATS UP<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

This claim, at best, is incomplete. True, many seductive supernatural creatures wreaked havoc and required destruction, as did the golem and dybbuk. But other such beings, like the maggid, served as muses that empowered those who encountered them to channel and employ for salutary purposes. Even the golem, as dangerous as it usually proved, served largely beneficent purposes, protecting communities of the persecuted. Thus, much as our ancient and medieval ancestors harnessed these seductive superhumans for their benefit, so too do we moderns need to shape and corral our contemporary demons into forces for good.<\/p>\n

In the end, we often do want our handheld, digital Mrs. Robinsons to seduce us. In this short but convincing volume, Reynolds adeptly shows us how, unlike Benjamin in the movie<\/a>, we should, and can, resist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cBenjamin,\u201d a half-naked Mrs. Robinson insists midway through the classic 1967 film The Graduate, \u201cI am not trying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81019,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,40641,742,44145,51,4023,2018,11371,134],"class_list":["post-81018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-book-reviews","tag-books","tag-magazine-life-arts","tag-mental-health","tag-relationships","tag-science-and-technology","tag-society","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}