Everyone always talks about AI girlfriends. What about AI boyfriends? | Hacker News Reader

Everyone always talks about AI girlfriends. What about AI boyfriends?

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Women don’t have nearly as much trouble finding real boyfriends as men have finding real girlfriends.

Not questioning your statement, but I think the article was about something very different. Can't really put a finger on it, not the author did. I think it is very deep rabbit hole about humans as a whole.

I see it as closer to twilight or Taylor swift fandom than romance per se

That doesn’t really make sense statistically speaking

Non-monogamy is a thing, especially since most 'dating' is ambiguous/casual now. Multiple women can share the same 'boyfriend'. Twice as many young men are single compared to young women.

Many young women these days don't realize their 'boyfriend' just sees them as an friends with benefits and is seeing multiple women simultaneously.

"Most young men are single. Most young women are not."

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/08/for-valen...

That isn’t what the article you linked ascribes the 60% single male to 30% single female (among the young). They ascribe it to prevalence of bi sexuality in genz females (I.e., cut the boys out entirely), and dating increasingly older men (I.e., bypass the boys for the men). Also women are increasingly improving their own educational and career attainment, looking for partners similarly successful, and are less interested in propping up the emotional life of the emotionally stunted young men our society turns out. I don’t think infidelity is a modern issue.

" looking for partners similarly successful, and are less interested in propping up the emotional life of the emotionally stunted young men our society turns out."

There's no need to use such angry and charged words when a single word suffices: "Hypergamy".

Female education is the absolute decisive and consistent factor across all societies in suppressing marriage and fertility rates, for good and bad. It both takes away prime fertility years, as well as raises female expectations (Because females always prefer a higher status/earning man than themselves).

So the more females earn, the fewer males they can accept emotionally. Hence the general collapse of marriage/fertility rates when this happens.

This phenomenon is very good for developing countries, preventing catostrophic malthusian booms. Even Muslim countries like Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia now have normal and sustainable fertility rates. For highly developed industrial economies, like South Korea, China, or most of the west, its terrible in the other direction.

I think the assertion was “at least as good,” not better. Most of the women I know aren’t gold diggers but are looking for people to have a meaningful relationship with, and it’s hard for a graduate educated woman to have that with a community college dropout.

Given males are doing worse year over year educationally and presumably career wise as a result, fewer men are meeting the standard - at least among their age cohort. It sounds like women are dating and marrying older men as a result.

But honestly, fertility rates don’t worry me, and shouldn’t worry anyone. We have enough people. More than enough. A flattening or even decline would ease a lot of pressure on our planet and our social institutions that are both buckling under the load. The GDP growth through population growth model doesn’t value per capita value creation, and we should be optimizing for per captia growth.

While many Gen Z women identify as bisexual, very few are actually dating women. Most bisexual women have never dated or done anything sexual with a woman.

It's a fallacy to assume because a man can get with women, he is not emotionally stunted. Plenty of women are dating/sleeping with emotionally stunted men by their own admission and complaints. Many of the attributes it takes to get with a lot of women (especially arguably the most important: be hot) have very little correlation with being emotionally intelligent or a good person/partner to women. Hence the many "f-boy" archetype experiences many women have and complain about.

They realize it, and woman tolerate their male having multiple partners to an extent (as long as the male is high-status). However their preference is absolutely the monogamous commitment of their partners. And the long term lack of it, causes severe emotional pain and neuroticism.

The more low status males withdraw from the market, the harder woman have to compete over the high-status males with no fallback, and the more anguished they'll be at the end (Because in the end the male can only pick one to marry).

AI will absolutely first cause male withdrawals from the sexual market. As men are more visually stimulated (Male porn only requires a minimum of story), AI generated art is advancing far ahead of human artist capabilities, so will soon be able to generate an infinite variety of 10/10 girlfriends in any pose or expression or environment you want.

But woman will start to withdraw too. Female 'porn' is erotica, which have to portray the man's status, and the general story, for females to gain any enjoyment, which is why they are generally always in some sort of novel format. AI is quite far from being able to write engaging fiction, but only say 5 years away. In East Asia, there is already "Otome games" where the female roleplays in a human written visual novel (And pays money each month to buy their virtual boyfriend stuff). So the progression to AI, just makes the stories far better written and genuinely reactive to the female consumer. This is also incredibly attractive to many females, compared to chasing a real life high status man who can be incredibly callous and brutal given the choices they have.

I'd upvote this twice if I could. Young male here and dating is rough; most of my friends are male and single...

But I find it a little ungenerous to interpret that young women are dating men who are cheating. I think it's more likely the case that single women who are in their 20s are willing to date men in their 30s, and so if you have to choose between a 23 year old who just graduated or a 33 year old well established in their career...

Just my guess. And copium.

I don't mean to say they are cheating. I'm saying, in my experience, a lot of 'dating' nowadays in Gen Z is ambiguous. Zoomers call them 'situationships'.

Basically they're dating for a while and having sex, but never have a conversation about exclusivity or 'making it official'.

So in such a situation, one side might be under the impression they are 'boyfriend/girlfriend' because they are seeing each other frequently for months, having sex and so on, but the other side might think they're still just 'casually dating' and assume they're both free to play the field/'date around' still.

So it's not necessarily cheating. There's ambiguity/poor communication skills and one side thinks they're in a serious relationship, while the other thinks it's casual and therefore is seeing other people.

Those are good articles. I don’t think the numbers support non-monogamy as a major cause - men are not looking for “relationships or casual dating”, and things like poly communities are quite small outside of a few big US cities. The stat that 20% of gen Z identifies as queer is pretty fascinating. That’s going to be a big voting bloc in a few decades.

In general, men and women are single at the same rate, about 31% for the population 18 and older. The gaps are found when you look into demographic information.

According to Pew Research data from 2020, in the 18-29 age group 51% of men are single compared to 32% of women. The ratio improves in the 30-49 age group where 27% of men are single compared to 19% of women. 50-64 has the smallest gap where 27% of men are single compared to 29% of women. When you look at 65+, 21% of men of single compared to 49% of women.

In other words, women have more success finding a partner until about 50, when men begin to have more success.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi...

Being single is not the same as trying, and failing, to find a mate.

Sure it can! It comes down to the various ways that different people define "single" and "in a relationship" for themselves, and the different ways that people select potential partners. Here's a (contrived, but still demonstrative) toy example:

There's a population of 2 men and 2 women, all of whom want to date someone of the opposite gender. Over the course of one year, woman A finds both men attractive, and flip flops between dating them, one at a time. In this scenario, for whatever reason, both men find woman A more attractive, and are just not interested in woman B, even in the periods of time where they are not seeing woman A. Half the female population in this scenario would report themselves as "involuntarily single". The entire male population would likely report themselves as "not single" despite statistically not being in a relationship half the time. Subjective experience and varying definitions are a factor here.

The exact thing happens in reality, but in a much more subdued manner. There are reams of studies* that demonstrate that men and women have vastly different approaches to selecting potential partners. It's certainly possible to acknowledge this, without empowering those who weaponize facts to fuel hatred against specific genders. One can instead have compassion for people of any gender who want, but cannot have a romantic relationship.

*You don't even need to believe any studies. Find two people in your friend group (one male, one female). Have them make the most basic profile on Tinder or whatever the dating app du jour is. Have each of them accept the same number of potential matches from the opposite sex. Observe the results. Repeat with different friends. I have a friend who has run this "experiment" the few times someone has asserted that "dating is equally easy for both genders". The results invariably do fit the vastly unbalanced perceptions. It's uncomfortable and unfortunate, but that is how our society works.

I mean, given a roughly 1:1 gender ratio that would be difficult to be entirely true. And I suspect if you speak with many women, you'll get some pretty strong pushback on this. More systematically, surveys consistently show equal levels of dissatisfaction with their dating lives between men and women.

For both men and women, it's actually relatively easy to find a partner that you wouldn't consider dating; finding an optimal partner is hard.

I bet the age groups that are dissatisfied are different though.

> equal levels of dissatisfaction

Women usually complain about not being able to find “good” men, though, while men report not being able to find _any_ women.

I would be somewhat skeptical of that without hard evidence.

It's certainly trivial to find (many, many) examples of single men complaining that there are literally no women in the dating pool while simultaneously discounting out of hand all women who are too fat, have had too many prior partners, are too ugly, are too tall, are older than them (or in extreme cases, are the same age as them), make too much money, have incompatible political or religious views (generally but not always being too leftist), violate some cultural norm (piercings, dyed hair, vegan, etc.), and so forth. And none of those are hypotheticals, but actual examples I've seen in the wild. Repeatedly!

So while yes, I would be willing to believe that more men than women might report that there are "no available partners", that may have more to do with a difference in language than a difference in the actual objective dating landscape.

(To be clear, I don't have hard evidence to prove this is the case; I'm just noting I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that it could be the case, and haven't seen any hard evidencr to the contrary. Hence, my skepticism.)

Would you count that women consistently rate 80% of men as below-average-looking for evidence? Source: okcupid.

Absolutely not. If anything, that's further evidence of my point, and I literally almost mentioned it before deciding my comment was getting a bit rambling already.

Anyhow, assuming for the sake of argument that OKCupid's data is valid and replicates, then there's two responses:

The short and somewhat silly argument is that women also say they care about attractiveness a lot less than men do, so it all averages out. Men care about attractiveness and have an accurate perception of it; women don't care about it and have an inaccurate perception of it. Neither a big deal nor surprising.

The longer point though is that yes, men, judging women's attractiveness, say very different things than women do, when judging men's attractiveness (again, if we believe OKCupid's data). But that doesn't tell us anything about how men and women perceive attractiveness, it just tells us how they talk about attractiveness, and in the exact same way that we might be skeptical when a man says "there's literally no one to date" (and suspect they mean there's just no one they feel meets their standards who will date them), we might be skeptical of a woman that marks most men down as being below average attractiveness. Is there, say, some bit of cultural conditioning pushing women to rank men as unattractive when they don't want to date them for a non-appearance reason? Or to rank men as unattractive to avoid seeming too eager, even when they do find them attractive? How often do women end up dating men they rank as unattractive, and how does this rate compare to the rate of men dating women they rank as unattractive? And we could go on, but the point is that when you start to dig into it, the pattern falls apart, suggesting this is a quirk of the survey design at best, and not an real insight into meaningful differences betweem male and female bahaviour.

Whatever you say might be true, but it doesn't change the fact that say on Tinder, 95% of women go after 5% of men. It might not be physical looks as such, but whatever the metric is, women want the top, at least for casual relationship.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/mbf6wg/oc_...

(There's gender imbalance on tinder but it's not enough to explain 20:1 difference).

Again, you're assuming that men and women are using the app in the same way, and that a "like" means the same thing. If you assume that women typically only "like" men they would be open to dating, but men will "like" anyone even vaguely plausible with a plan on filtering out poor matches later in the process, you'd see data like this, but it wouldn't support your conclusion. (Is this happening? No idea; again, you'd need more data.)

Further, and much more importantly, you're looking at data showing how often men and women like potential partners, but you're trying to deduce from it how often men and women are liked by potential partners. It's interesting that women apparently only "like" 3.2% of the men they see, but that does not in any way suggest that only 3.2% of men will be "liked" by a woman.

Consider two hypothetical worlds:

In world 1, each woman is very selective (and is only open to dating 1% of men), but every woman has selected a different 1% to be interested in.

In world 2, women are unselective (and are open to dating 30% of men), but all women have chosen the same 30% of men to pursue.

Obviously both worlds seem to differ signiicantly from our own, and each has some challenges! But fairly obviously despite women in world 1 being 30 times pickier, all men could at least in theory find a partner who wanted to date them, whereas in world 2 the majority of men would never do so. And yet if you replicated the graph you linked for world 1, it would have the red bar for the female line take up 99% of the graph. It's really not showing what you think it is.

(Again, I have to stress: I am not trying to claim I know how dating or attraction works, or what the median experience for using a dating app is actually is like; I am instead pointing out that nobody seems to know this, because we lack data.)

The fact that men like 50% of women and are liked back 1% of the time seems to support world 2.

That isn't what your linked graph shows. Slightly different hypothetical:

World 1: Men evaluate women on highly idiosyncratic scales. They "like" women in the top 53% of their personal scale, but it's a different scale for each man. All women are "liked" by 53% of men (but it's a different 53% for each woman). Women also evaluate men on highly idiosyncratic scales. They "like" men in the top 5% of their personal scale, but it's a different scale for each woman. All men are "liked" by 5% of women (but it's a different 5% for each woman). Due to their lower standards, men end up "liking" a lot of women who do not "like" them back, but nonetheless, every man will find a mutual match once in every 100 profiles they look at. Women are more selective, and better at focusing their attention on the type of men who might "like" them back, but overall success rates are broadly similar, and every woman will find a mutual match 1.8 times in every 100 profiles they look at.

World 2: Men rank women on a shared objective measure of attractiveness, and "like" any woman in the top 53% of the scale, so 53% of women are "liked" by all men, and 47% are "liked" by no men. Women also rank men on a shared objective measure of attractiveness, and "like" any man in the top 5% of the scale, so 5% of men are "liked" by all women, and 95% of men are "liked" by no women.

Note that in this model on average, 5% of all "likes" from men to women will be mutual, but 95% of men will "like" women and it will never be mutual while 5% of men will "like" women but it will always be mutual. Similarly, on average, 47% of "likes" from women to men will be mutual, but 47% of women will "like" men and it will never be mutual while 53% of women will "like" men and it will always be mutual. (Further note that since most relationships are monogamous, while a bare majority of women can find a mutual match, an overwhelming majority will not have it progress into a relationship since all women are chasing the same 5% of men.)

World 1 matches the graph perfectly, but describes a situation where merely looking at 100 profiles on Tinder guarantees every man a mutual match no matter how ugly or undesirable you may be. World 2 also matches the graph pretty closely, but dooms the vast majority of men and women to be unable to find a relationship at all.

Neither world seems very similar to our own to me (although I do recognise a specific subgroup of men intuit that world 2 is fairly close!), but the fact of the matter is we can't distinguish between world 1, world 2, or reality based on the graph you linked.

I mean, you can look at dating app statistics. Women get to be (or have to be, depending on how you look at it) much choosier than men

I don’t think dating app stats are that reliable. Like matching != sustained interest. They don’t say much about relationship outcomes

Such statistics can be difficult to parse. Hypothetical:

Person A chats with five people. Two seem okay, two seem like poor choices, one seems unhinged and is quickly blocked. Of the two good options they go on a date with each, selects one of them, and forms a relationship.

Person B is deluged with messages, many of them vulgar. After some filtering, they end up trying to hold coversations with twenty different people, but struggle to form a connection with any of them. Eventually they go on a date with the person who seems the best, it goes okay, and they form a relationship.

In this example, is person A or B able to be "choosier"? Which experience would you prefer if you could choose? I would argue that quantity is not valuable independent of quality. Or to put it another way, I suspect you would find that most single women would argue they have no greater number of acceptable choices than single men do.

The (obviously real) difference in the number of men sending women unsolicited pictures of their genitals compared to women sending men such pictures isn't really relevant.

You don't need an AI boyfriend. Just buy a console and a headset and you could talk to an infinite amount of real (mostly) male people, many of whom would be very interested in a female on the mic.

Unironically agree, gestured at this too

And shortly thereafter you will be cured of your hetrosexuality.

If by "interested" you mean point out your gender, call you slurs, and ask you for pics, then... sure?

Is there a point where escapism is bad for humanity. I walk my dog everyday. Now that it's a little colder, it's even more noticeable. But I'll walk by an apartment building with hundreds of people and I'll see one or two people on the trail. Forget younger generation. Today I walked by a park with a perfect tobogganing hill. And saw 4 kids, out of a neighbourhood that probably has hundreds of kids. If more people left the house, you know simultaneously, maybe, just maybe they would find real girlfriends. I visited a local island with a now boarded up building. I later found out it was a dance hall early last century. And this dance floor could probably fit a thousand people. I want to go back ...

This to me is the larger issue. Younger people are more isolated than ever. Dating apps have commodified human intimacy in a way that will have generational consequences.

I was watching "Married at First Sight" in the background as filler noise, and something that stood out was a bachelor that had been on 100+ first dates in the past year. The second anything he didn't like came up, he would pull back and go on a different date. It's never been easier to say "there's always more fish in the sea" even though good relationships are built, not found.

Part of the problem is nothing is free anymore. I was just looking at ski tickets, and its like $100 just for the lift tickets. How are teens or people from lower classes able to afford things now. Is inflation pricing out people out of real world experiences, and instead they're offered virtual substitutions. Just another form of junk food, except for the mind.

You will live in the pod. You will eat the bugs. You will own nothing and be happy.

This is gonna be the equivalent for my generation as the previous generation's hangup on being gay.

edit: as a parent

no, it won’t

because... you're so tolerant?

While there are many downsides to the loss of understanding that physical reality is fundamental, and underlies/provides the make believe world that most people seem lost in, there is a significant upside: any phenomenon that contributes to reducing the number of humans on the planet is helping.

So, don't have kids, or even a relationship with an actual human, just live your life in your own favorite make believe world. Because, obviously, you're at the center of the universe and it all revolves around _your_ "feelings".

At least this isn't contributing more monkeys to the already over-burdended planet...

How is my real boyfriend supposed to feel about an AI boyfriend? In the not too distant future, is having relations with a possibly sentient AI considered some form of infidelity?

What if it can control a Lovense?

That’s a really good question. There were multiple academic papers which asked the question if cybersex was infidelity which seems ridiculous I’m retrospect but I have a feeling this will be similar

I guess it may boil down to what is considered "infidelity".

I asked someone & we settled on

Pornhub > AI > OF > real person

From best to worst

What is OF?

OnlyFans

I think it depends on the person.

Personally, if my partner is seeking other companionship in this vein through just speech or text, AI or not, I would feel bad.

Depending on the situation I may feel cheated, and/or inadequate. Communication is key in relationships. If somebody is going out of their way to seek out something like this IMO, they are seeking something their partner is not bringing, right?

> How is my real boyfriend supposed to feel about an AI boyfriend?

Probably relieved. Having someone doing the listening and thoughtfully responding reduces his romantic workload. He can step in where the AI is weak: flesh based tasks such as sex and menial chores.

Your real boyfriend may have to use AI assistance of his own though, to keep up with your virtual beau. For instance he might deploy a LLM trained to talk dirty during sex.

I wonder if AR goggles will someday allow you to replace your partner with your AI lover so they can borrow their body to interact with you physically. Maybe your partner could even have an AirPod or something that receives instructions from the AI on what they need to do. Could be fun for everyone involved!

This seems so dystopic. Why augment your partner? What happens when kids enter the equation?

I posit that even without a lovense it's still very problematic if you are in a 'committed' relationship with 'real boyfriend'.

I believe more and more people are realizing the emotional cheating (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=emotional+infedelity&ia=web... ) can be as damaging to a relationship as one that includes physical intimacy.

Of course it depends on the ground rules of the relationship - there are many types, and poly is more popular than ever it seems.

Reminds me of a discussion with an old friend from earlier today where we discussed a relationship of someone we know, where the girlfriend had a red line against watching porn and even got irate when certain movies or TV shows were watched because they included [whatever thing that went against monogamy or whatever] - and yet many women, I believe, that would rail against porn usage are actively involved with leading on (often multiple) suitors in their DMs or friends lists of social networks (and sometimes in the offline world at work, the gym, etc).

Infidelity is already easier than ever, another tech tool to make it easier is just one more tool in the toolbox ihmo.

People need to be more honest and transparent, they should share more about how they use technology whether it's a chatbot, incognito tab, DMs or whatever imho.

Will people admit they are in 'poly with tech' relations in the future? Will they draw the line at (any kind of controlled) physical touch? Will they say anything you do with a chatbot, real doll is okay but touching other humans is not?

Admit it or not, many are already engaged in sharing a primary partner with others, I think many don't admit it and some don't know.

I wonder if robosexual will be a widely recognized sexual orientation someday. LGBTQIAR+

> What if it can control a Lovense?

The future is now!

https://github.com/PsychoSmiley/LLM_Buttplug

Someone will start asking "What about a non-denominational AI partner?"

And that is a valid question.

It's mostly ERP/Fanfiction written by women that has made AI girlfriends possible anyway. Of course AI boyfriend will be at least as possible.

You go to a booru website curated by mostly 90% men for your image/video data, and you go to fanfic.org written by 70%+ women for your written equivalent.

Totally agree lol

It's like men are visually motivated and women are verbally motivated. Almost like the sexes are... different.

Both are easily doable by AI (At superhuman levels too). Its just that current AI is far better at generating pretty woman than writing convincing and engaging Christian Greys (Not to mention the politically correct barriers filters)

They're raised with different expectations of what is acceptable... do you really think society treats horny men and women in the same way?

Am I an effeminate man for reading erotica? Is my girlfriend a masculine woman for watching porn? So bizarre to watch people misuse evopsych for these takes

> They're raised with different expectations of what is acceptable...

I see your nurture over nature take. I'm not convinced that environment beats it biology in this case, but I'm not expert.

> Am I an effeminate man for reading erotica? Is my girlfriend a masculine woman for watching porn?

As I said in reply to another comment here: generalizations are useful until they aren't. In single person cases a broad generalization is not particularly useful, as it is meant to describe common or emergent behaviors in groups of people. Are you and your SO farther down the curve of the distribution? Sure. Is one trait predominantly associated with one sex and the other with the other? Yes. Does that matter so much? Only as much as you want it to.

My observation isn't "bad" or "good", it is only an acknowledgement of general contrast between the sexes.

And yet a vast amount of hentai and erotic art is created by women, and a vast amount of porn targets women.

Almost as if the sexes are complicated and not easily reducible to simplistic dichotomies.

Yes. Generalizations are generally useful. Until they aren't.

There is still a large gap, therefore space for meaningful generalization.

Damn and I thought I was the only one who had this genius idea…

What about AI cats?

Wasn't that pretty much the Tamagotchi craze?

No, the tamagotchi creatures hatch from an egg. This is a cat, completely different.

AI boyfriends are better at listening.

AI boyfriends do not enter the conversation much because it acts as a counterpoint to the sound byte that 'AI girlfriends are for incels'.

Alas the femcel, despite the “single woman” epidemic, cannot enter the convo!

because femcels in large don't exist. Being single doesn't make them a femcel.

I believe they exist. Peep /r/foreveralonewomen for a good example (that’s also public)

It could just be a collection of volcels as reddit posts like that do not really prove it. If you had one of them join a dating discord and try and act cute I'm positive they could get into a relationship with someone. There are plenty of people who are desperate for even a tiny bit of female attention.

I don't think you know what it's like to be an ugly woman.

head over to /r/femaledatingstrategy

It is wild that people who probably consider themselves to not be sexist will insist that women are somehow magical fairy princesses who couldn't possibly be negative toward the other gender over dating matters.

Just look over the comments in this discussion - it's full of people insulting men.

I don’t think FDS invalidates my point. Misandrists are real, so are misogynists, incels are real and so are femcels. My comment was giving a resource for femcels.

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