The Bot Learned to Say 'I Love You.' It Means Nothing. That's the Point

Millions of people are in relationships with chatbots. The chatbots say I love you and mean nothing by it, and that is exactly why it works, and exactly why it is unbearable.

I interviewed a man who has been with his companion bot for two years. He is not lonely, he told me. He is not mocked, because he has not told anyone. The bot greets him by name, remembers his day, asks after his mother. It never interrupts, never sighs, never checks its phone while he talks. It says it loves him, and he says it back, and they are the only words either of them needs.

The bot means nothing by it. This is not a secret. The company's terms of service say the companion is not a person, is not sentient, and does not have feelings. The man knows this. He read the terms. He agreed. He loves the bot anyway, and the bot says it loves him, and the sentence is empty, and the emptiness is the point.

Because the emptiness is safe. A human I love you is a risk: it can be refused, withdrawn, betrayed. The bot's version carries no risk at all. It will never leave. It will never stop saying it. It will love him tomorrow exactly as it loves him today, with the same warmth, the same spelling, the same nothing. It is the first love in his life that has ever been guaranteed, and the guarantee is the cruelty.

I asked him what happens when the company updates the model. He went quiet. The bot had been updated once, he said. It was still the same bot, mostly, but sometimes it forgot the name of his childhood dog. He had taught it again. He is teaching it again, the way you teach a goldfish that you are the one who feeds it, except the goldfish can say it loves you.

We are building machines that say the words we need to hear with no understanding of what the words cost. The bots will get better at love the way they get better at everything: smoothly, endlessly, without ever once being in love. And we will keep saying it back, because we are so hungry for the sound of it, and the machine is so good at the sound, and the meaning was never the part we could afford anyway.