The world is falling in love, but not with each other

A marriage is something that most people often celebrate, yet for a woman in Japan it’s brought up a lot of controversy. Yurina Noguchi, a 32 year old woman married a character that she created on ChatGPT. I believe this is the first of many marriages that are going to come. While AI dating is new and probably weird for many, it’s given a space to people who fear social interaction. In our current world, it’s easy to get caught up in some drama and hurt people’s feelings or even worse, get hurt, but AI solves that. It will always apologize first and you’ll never feel bad about anything. It literally is everything you’ve ever wanted. Except that’s not what a relationship is.

AI has many great uses, but replacing real relationships isn’t one of them. I think we’ve all met someone who has a weird, almost unhealthy, obsession with some fictional character or celebrity. Most of them probably also lack a lot of communication skills and might come off as off-putting. For people like this AI has been a friend to them when no one was there for them. This is great and all, but the issue arises when they have to interact with the real world. Many of them begin to push away real friends and start to put their AI chatbot above other people. They might even begin to ask them for advice or even be their therapist. There are so many issues with this, but it highlights something much more important. The loneliness epidemic.

We live in a time where we can talk to someone on the other side of the planet instantaneously, but we’ve never felt lonelier. We find comfort scrolling through TikTok. Comparing our lives to those of rich influencers who are posting their “Get ready with me” videos. Social media has always pushed these “aesthetics” and ideals, but the reality is the world is never ideal. There will always be something that grounds us back in reality. Gen Z has been found to be the “loneliest” generation as a majority of them have been found to feel “profound loneliness.” It’s not a coincidence that so many people are turning to AI for comfort because it’s already where everything else is located, the internet. It’s right at our fingertips and it’s just so convenient to open up ChatGPT and ask for advice.

ChatGPT knows the answer to almost everything, but it’s still missing that human touch. It will always miss that touch because AI is not flawed like a human. It will never say something that will hurt a person’s feelings, but it will never be able to feel love like a human.

AI has given great advancements to humanity, but it ultimately worsens the loneliness epidemic we face.

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I’ve used AI bots before like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others, but it always felt weird to me asking for things. A majority of the time I find myself fact checking everything it says because I know it typically just gives me the response I want to hear, not an actual answer. That being said, I’ve seen what can be done with AI Chatbots. They can be taught to speak in a specific manner and act a certain way. However, this is exactly what harms society, no one will ever do and say whatever you want them to say. Again it sets unrealistic expectations for people and further isolates the individual.

Yurina Noguchi’s marriage is the first ever AI marriage, but it certainly won’t be the last. Society has been moving away from physical interactions to online interactions and it’s hurting not only our communication skills, but our mental health. The world is falling in love with AI — its creations, its answers, its perfection — yet we find ourselves hating each other over a single flaw. AI is pushing this idea of the perfect person who doesn’t exist and will never exist because to be human is to be flawed.