Virtual Girlfriends for a Generation Raised in a Virtual World

The idea of a "virtual girlfriend" is not new, the first having been introduced to the world at least two decades ago. Still, the concept has got more attention with the recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, because of its apparent potential to endow virtual characters with unprecedented verisimilitude.

Of course, this is a subject one cannot discuss without acknowledging the enormous baggage almost everyone brings to the idea, which makes a snicker seem obligatory for many--all as a good many anxieties swirl behind the irony, because even as they shame anyone who would find such an idea attractive, they know not everyone shares the feeling they affect, and dread the implications. "How can the process of starting and building and maintaining a real relationship with a real person, with their own needs and demands, and the resulting doubts and uncertainties and tensions and compromises and frustrations that go with it, compete with that?" they think--and know that all other things being equal, it can't.

But all other things are not equal, of course, with the most obvious answer to those worries the fact that virtual partners are non-corporeal (at least, given the state of the art in 2024). They can never actually be "there," with all that implies for the limits of their interaction. And my first thought was that this would limit their having any very significant appeal to only a very few.

However, considering that I realized that I was thinking in terms of the expectations and standards of a different era. After all, we live in an age in which young adults have never known life without a smart phone in their hand, and consider the demand that they turn their phone off for so much as a few minutes a profoundly unreasonable imposition. Meanwhile at this point even persons who are much older, who did know life in a pre-smart phone, even pre-Internet, world, have nonetheless been shaped by the newer world. They spend life with their noses stuck to their phones, as the bulk of their interaction with others occurs through this medium--even their interaction with people they know in person, with whom they share households. All by itself this suggests physical presence may not be quite so important to them as it would be for someone not so immersed in such experience of the world, even where this particular type of relationship is concerned. (After all, it may be that a non-negligible proportion of the population has already experienced "intimacy" through this medium--maybe much more than non-negligible, to go by how many high-profile figures, old enough to have known life before the web, have got themselves scandalized and divorced this way.)

Of course, the common retort to that is that the people they interact with electronically in these ways are at least "real" in the sense that they have a physical existence, and that even if they have never met them in person, could potentially do that. But when the interaction is exclusively, or even principally, through a screen, it seems plausible that this distinction will matter less to a great many persons, especially if they like what they see on that screen and hear through the device's speaker. Indeed, considering this I am put in mind of Edward Castronova's thoughts about the "virtual reality" of World of Warcraft. The technological media through which the user experienced "VR" was primitive next to the '90s-era hype about what it would be looked, but for all that people were immersed, hooked, so much so that Castronova was to shortly write of an "exodus to the virtual world" from this one.

Again, all this was two decades ago--and so far as I know nothing has come along to refute his expectation. Indeed, in a world where postmodernist epistemological nihilism has been thoroughly mainstream for as long as anyone can remember they can that much more easily answer "What's real anyway?" They can even answer, "Who cares?"--especially as this pertains to the personal, emotional, sphere, where the sorts of hard material facts that don't go away no matter how much you want them to simply do not intrude so much. History has seen many arguing for alluring illusions over reality, those "French poetry majors" that the STEM fetishists so love to bash likely to know something of the writing of Charles Baudelaire, and just which one of the human faculties was queen over the rest.

Quite in line with such expectations, in figures like Toru Honda the age of the virtual girlfriend would already seem to have a start on its philosophers, arguing for the validity of this course on the basis of Platonic idealism. His views will hardly convince the skeptical--but at the very least seem likely to hint at the shape of things to come. However much those who disapprove would like for that to go away.