21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Meet your new virtual girlfriend.

There weren’t many details provided in the FAQ section of the clone’s website. But in case you think I’m painting an unfairly salacious picture of this project, it says, “Your Virtual Girlfriend” right at the top of the page. So what are we to assume that means exactly? There’s a difference between “curing loneliness” and some of the other activities people might expect to engage in with their “girlfriend.” (A request for comment was not immediately returned today.)

How “real” would this “girlfriend” experience be? When a Wall Street Journal columnist recently created a clone of herself, the result was pretty good and even seemed realistic enough to fool someone for a short time. But any conversations that became complex caused the fakery to be fairly obvious in a short time.

On the one hand, this looks like one of the least dangerous applications of AI to show up recently, at least in terms of robots taking over the world. But at the same time, perhaps it’s just me but this looks kind of sad and potentially dangerous in another way. Are people going to get so caught up in a “relationship” with this clone that they begin cutting themselves off from the real world? And when the realization sets in that the relationship is never going to be “consummated” (to put it politely), might the person’s loneliness and even depression become even worse?

Related: Glenn’s recent Substack essay: AI and the Screwfly Succession: What if love really does conquer all?