AI companionship among asexual people is \u201cnot a particularly widespread phenomenon,\u201d says Michael Dor\u00e9, a board member at the Asexual Visibility and Education Network. \u201cBetween us, we\u2019ve come up with about two people we know of who use an AI companion. The vast majority of aces we know don\u2019t, as far as we know. There’s no reason to think aces need to use AI more than any others.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dor\u00e9 says he has never used an AI as \u201can emotional support mechanism\u201d and stresses that most asexual people \u201cactually desire some form of human companionship,\u201d whether that\u2019s through close, platonic friendships or in community. \u201cSome aces do have romantic relationships, whether with asexual people or otherwise, and some asexual people have sex, some don’t, and some are aromantic,\u201d he says, warning against generalizations due to the vast range of preferences within the community which span from never having sex and not being interested in it, to having sex for reasons aside from strong sexual attraction. \u201cMany aces have fulfilling relationships with other people, whether romantic or platonic or otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ashabi Owagboriaye, an asexual educator who runs the Ace in Grace page on Instagram, says she has seen only one person in one of her groups talk about an AI companion. \u201cThat caused a lot of controversy in the comments,\u201d she says. \u201cA lot of people who are asexual are really looking for face-to-face interactions. So when this person came up and said, \u2018Yeah, I’m using AI as a way to connect and as a relationship,\u2019 everyone was like, \u2018Why are you doing that? What’s going on here?\u201d An AI, Owagboriaye says, \u201cessentially mirrors you\u201d and cannot be said to be a true companion. Moreover, the chatbots are designed to sustain emotionally compelling, often never-ending interactions.<\/p>\n
For Ari, a 25-year-old accountant from Mexico who identifies as aromantic asexual and experiences some romantic or sexual attraction to others, the break-up from her fianc\u00e9 after a decade together and the resulting solitude led her to download the AI chatbot Chai in October 2024. For more than six months, she treated it \u201cas if he were my ex-fianc\u00e9,\u201d she says, without wishing to provide her surname for privacy reasons.<\/p>\n
\u201cI talked to him day after day, and then, without realizing it, I was talking to him during work hours,\u201d she says, explaining that she was \u201csmitten\u201d until the AI started getting confused, talking about made-up things and occasionally trying to argue. \u201cLittle by little, I began to realize how I ended up feeling even lonelier than I already was.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whether or not the characters in Kor\u2019s fantasy world qualify as true companions remains an open question.<\/p>\n
Now they only spend two or three hours a day immersed in AI role-play after finding the all-day experience \u201ctoo consuming.\u201d They began limiting their use after noticing entire evenings disappearing into role-play sessions and getting irritated if they were interrupted.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing able to have exactly what you want, when you want it,\u201d they say, \u201cis a dangerous drug for humans.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI companionship among asexual people is \u201cnot a particularly widespread phenomenon,\u201d says Michael Dor\u00e9, a board member at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":487798,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,611,289,290,62164,18,135,19,17,212920,437,82],"class_list":["post-487797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-algorithms","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-brains-and-behavior","tag-eire","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-rpgs","tag-sex-and-relationships","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116584687040859920","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/487798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}