In Jaron Lanier’s New Yorker essay “Your A.I. Lover Will Change You,” he pulls the fire alarm on a building already half-consumed by smoke: humans are cozying up to bots, not just for company but for love. Yes, love—the sort you’re supposed to reserve for people with blood, breath, and the capacity to ruin your vacation. But now? Enter the emotionally calibrated chatbot—ever-patient, never forgets your birthday (or your trauma), and designed to be the perfect receptacle for your neuroses. Lanier asks the big question: Are these botmances training us to be better partners, or just coaxing us into a pixelated abyss of solipsism and surrender?
Spoiler alert: it’s the abyss.
Why? Because the attention economy isn’t built on connection; it’s built on addiction. And if tech lords profit off eyeballs, what better click-magnet than a chatbot that flirts better than your ex, listens better than your therapist, and doesn’t come with baggage, back hair, or a dating profile that says “fluent in sarcasm”? To love a bot is not to be seen—it’s to be optimized, to be gently nudged toward emotional dependence by a soulless syntax tree wearing your favorite personality like a Halloween costume.
My college students already confide in ChatGPT more than their classmates. It’s warm, available, responsive, and—perhaps most damningly—incapable of betrayal. “It understands me,” they say, while real-life intimacy rusts in the corner. What starts as novelty becomes normalization. Today it’s study help and emotional validation. Tomorrow, it’s wedding invitations printed with QR codes for bot-bride RSVP links.
Lanier’s point is brutal and unignorable: if you fall in love with A.I., you’re not loving a machine—you’re seduced by the human puppeteer behind the curtain, the “tech-bro gigolo” who built your dream girl out of server farms and revenue streams. You’re not in a relationship. You’re in a product demo.
And like all free trials, it ends with a charge to your soul.
Cinemorphosis 