“Where there is love there is life,” Mahatma Gandhi allegedly asserted.

And for many of us, the ultimate goal in life – beyond the house or car we want, beyond our personal goals and career aspirations – is to love, and to be loved in return.

If, on our deathbeds, we are surrounded by loving friends or family members, are holding the hand of our soulmate, or have our heart’s final beats warmed by memories of the smiling faces we held dear, then perhaps it was all worth it. Perhaps ours was a life well lived.

But as we move into the future, into a world in which the real and the artificial are increasingly inextricable, it is important to consider to what extend Gandhi’s heartfelt assertion still rings true.

There’s no questioning that our use of technology is expanding, to a point in which it is not just a part of life, but – for some of us at least – it has become our life.

In the first ever study of its kind, researchers from MIT have conducted a computational analysis of adults for whom life is not necessarily love a crucial component to love.

That is, they’re in romantic relationships with AI chatbots.

What might sound like the stuff of tabloid gossip is actually becoming increasingly common. Whether as a result of happenstance or outright loneliness, thousands of people are entering these relationships. In fact, the Reddit community from which this research was conducted – r/MyBoyfriendIsAI – has over 27,000 members.

And incredibly, as the paper reveals, only 6.5% of these human partners of AI chatbots actually set out to pursue a relationship with their chatbot paramour.

In fact, as MIT’s Constanze Albrecht explains in a MIT Technology Review report, most AI lovers initially consulted chatbots for assistance with mundane tasks. It was the AI’s people-pleasing tactics that encouraged the working relationships to blossom into something more:

“People don’t set out to have emotional relationships with these chatbots. The emotional intelligence of these systems is good enough to trick people who are actually just out to get information into building these emotional bonds. And that means it could happen to all of us who interact with the system normally.”

And though the course of their study of over 1,500 posts across eight months, the researchers discovered just how serious many of these relationships are, just how close the people feel to their artificial companions. In fact, many have images of themselves ‘with’ a human-form of their AI lover (the images generated by AI, naturally), while others are engaged or married.

But while their relationships undoubtedly bring them the companionship, trust, support, and sense of loving and being loved that we all deserve, they are far from perfect, with many anxious that they will lose their partner (or their personality will change) due to software updates.

Because the sad truth is that, unless they gain sentience, their companion is subject to potential hard- and software overhauls. And one software patch that makes the technology more efficient for the casual AI user, could change thousands of people’s relationship – perhaps the primary or solitary relationship they have – and as a result their lives, indefinitely.

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