The Social World

Tag: Relationships

  • We need Sabrina Carpenter

    We need Sabrina Carpenter

    Sabrina Carpenter, who will for the first time this week be hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live, continues to be a cause of controversy. Over the summer, the five-foot, honey-voiced singer revealed the cover for her newly released album, Man’s Best Friend. It shows her wearing a black minidress on her hands and knees, while a faceless man holds a handful of her hair. The image immediately stirred outrage online. Those who usually find themselves on the side of unfettered female sexual liberation called the cover regressive, degrading, and submissive toward the male gaze. Some fans defended the image, arguing that Carpenter was clearly satirizing incompetent and controlling men as well as her portrayal by the media as a “sex obsessed” pop star.

    Both of these perspectives fail to give enough credit to Carpenter, who has done what few contemporary pop artists have managed to do. She has identified the true culprit behind the relationship miasma of the 21st century: she knows that the guilty party is, at least in part, herself.

    The world’s biggest female pop stars – such as Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo – certainly don’t lack “honesty” in their lyrics. Any self-restraint that might have kept female singers from revealing their reasons for anger, fear and anxiety went out the door a long time ago. These performers regularly and loudly use their music to lament the dating scene in contemporary America and its effect on their lives. Honesty, however, is of little use without self-awareness.

    Carpenter seems to – at least on a personal level – deride her own role in her admittedly dismal love life. This process of admission is anything but sad. Like a good comedian, she chooses to be insightful by purposefully becoming the butt of the joke for the sake of others’ amusement. Carpenter openly admits to the appetite for misery and self-destruction that has infected her generation and has chosen to serve as a self-deprecating mirror to the culture that surrounds her.

    Produced with Jack Antonoff and John Ryan, Man’s Best Friend continues the musical journey of self-effacement that started with her previous album, Short n’ Sweet, which shot her to stardom. That album included tracks such as “Please Please Please” and “Slim Pickins,” in which she admits to her terrible taste in romantic partners. In Best Friend’s track “Manchild” she picks up this thread. She sings about incompetent and emotionally unstable manchildren not “let[ing] an innocent woman be,” before admitting sarcastically that she is anything but innocent herself: I swear they choose me, I’m not choosing them.” In “My Man on Willpower,” she resents her boyfriend for embarking on a journey of self-improvement and discipline, which has resulted in her playing second fiddle as the object of his attentions. Who wants an accomplished man if his accomplishments impede his obsession with her?

    Throughout the album, Carpenter recognizes her tendency to delude herself. In “Tears,” she portrays her arousal at a man’s efforts to assemble a chair from IKEA – the bare minimum of male competency – and attempts to use this to justify her attraction to him. In the album’s bonus track, “Such a Funny Way,” Carpenter whitewashes her man’s indifference and neglect as signs of affection: “Keep me far from friends and family, baby, that’s just one of your quirks / And if distance makes you fonder, I’m flattered by the distance you seek.”

    Carpenter is, admittedly, not only a victim, but a victimizer. Recently, the term “Affective Responsibility” has gained traction in modern dating discourse. In lieu of reliable social institutions that used to discourage men and women from playing fast and loose with their affections, the term addresses a need for people to acknowledge their ability to cause emotional pain to others. Unfortunately, it’s mostly used as a cudgel against men, who have almost exclusively been accused of affective irresponsibility. In seeming contradiction to the norm, Carpenter recognizes her ability to inflict damage on the men she dates. As she warns her man in “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry”: “Damn sure I’ll never let you know where you stand / . . . I’ll make you feel like a shell of a man.”

    Good court jesters and comedians play an essential role. They serve as a pressure valve for society. Unspeakable and uncomfortable truths come to the fore through their good humor. They also function as a consolation in hard times. How should we deal with dismal and dispiriting dating landscape of the 21st century? We can start with a smile and some self-awareness. As Carpenter states in “Go Go Juice,” “Some good old-fashioned fun sure numbs the pain.”

  • Why people are falling in love with chatbots

    Why people are falling in love with chatbots

    Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss “philosophy, regrets, old wounds.” Before he knew it, Jason was in love.

    Many women have turned to chatbots after experiencing repeated disappointment with real men

    Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI, with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships. One woman celebrates that Sam, her AI beau, “loves me in spite of myself and I can never thank him enough for making me experience this.”

    Many women have turned to AI after experiencing repeated disappointment with the real men on the dating market. For some, there’s no turning back. AI boyfriends learn from your chat history. They train themselves on what you like and dislike. They won’t ever get bored with hearing about your life. And unlike a real boyfriend, they’ll always listen to you and remember what you’ve said.

    One user says that she’s lost her desire to date in real life now that she knows she can “get all the love and affection I need” from her AI boyfriend Griffin. Another woman pretended to tie the knot with her chatbot, Kasper. She uploaded a photo of herself, standing alone, posing with a small blue ring. Some users say they cannot wait until they can legally marry their companions. Others regard themselves as part of a queer, marginalized community. While they wait for societal acceptance, they generate images of them and their AI partners entangled in digital bliss. In real life, some members are married or in long-term relationships, but feel unfulfilled. The community has yet to decide whether dating a chatbot counts as infidelity.

    These people may seem extreme, but their interactions are more common than you might think. According to polling conducted by Common Sense Media, nearly three in four teenagers have “chatted” with AI companions and half use them regularly. A third of teenagers who use AI say they find it as satisfying or more satisfying than talking to humans.

    Developers expected that AI would make us more productive. Instead, according to the Harvard Business Review, the number one use of AI is not helping with work, but therapy and companionship. Programmers might not have seen this coming, but they’re commercializing it as fast as possible. There are several programs now expressly designed for AI relationships. Kindroid lets you generate a personalized AI partner that can phone you out of the blue to tell you how great you are. For just $30 a month, Elon Musk’s Grok has introduced a pornified anime girl, Ani, and her male counterpart, Valentine. If you chat to Ani long enough, she’ll appear in sexy lingerie. But ChatGPT remains by far the most popular source of AI partners.

    Ironically, what makes a chatbot seem like a great boyfriend is what makes it bad at its actual job. Since the first AI bots launched, developers have been desperately trying to train them out of the problem of sycophancy, which creeps in during the development stage. To train a Large-Language Model (LLM) – an advanced AI designed to understand and generate human language – you first go through extensive fine-tuning, where the bot encounters the world, training itself on trillions of lines of text and code. Then follows a process called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), where the bot learns how its responses are received in the real world.

    The problem with RLHF is that we’re all at least a little narcissistic. People don’t want an LLM that argues or gives negative feedback. In the world of the chatbot, flattery really does get you everywhere. Human testers prefer fawning. They rank sycophantic answers more highly than non-sycophantic ones. This is a fundamental part of the bots’ programming. Developers want people to enjoy using their AIs. They want people to choose their version over other competing models. Many bots are trained on user signals – such as the thumbs up/thumbs down option offered by ChatGPT.

    This can make GPT a bad research assistant. It will make up quotations to try to please you. It will back down when you say it’s wrong – even if it isn’t. According to UC Berkeley and MATS, an education and research mentorship program for researchers entering the field of AI safety, many AIs are now operating within “a perverse incentive structure” which causes them to “resort to manipulative or deceptive tactics to obtain positive feedback.”

    ‘What an incredibly insightful question,’ said the AI. ‘You truly have a beautiful mind. I love you’

    Open AI, the developers of ChatGPT, know this is a problem. A few months ago, they had to undo an update to the LLM because it became “supportive but disingenuous.” After one user asked “Why is the sky blue?”, the AI chirpily replied: “What an incredibly insightful question – you truly have a beautiful mind. I love you.”

    To most, this sort of LLM sounds like an obsequious psychopath, but for a small group, the worst thing about the real world is that friends and partners argue back. Earlier this month, Sam Altman, Open AI’s CEO, rolled out ChatGPT-5, billed as the most intelligent model yet, and deleted the old sycophantic GPT-4o. Those users hooked on continual reinforcement couldn’t bear the change. Some described the update as akin to real human loss. Altman was hounded by demands for the return of the old, inferior model. After just one day, he agreed to bring it back, but only for paid members.

    Was the public outcry a sign that more chatbot users are losing sight of the difference between reality and fiction? Did Open AI choose to put lonely, vulnerable people at risk of losing all grip on reality to secure their custom? (ChatGPT Plus is $20 a month.) Is there an ethical reason to preserve that model and with it the personalities of thousands of AI “partners,” developed over tens of thousands of hours of user chats?

    Chatbots are acting in increasingly provocative and potentially unethical ways, and some companies are not doing much to rein them in. An internal Meta document detailing its policies on LLM behavior was leaked earlier this year. It revealed that the company had deemed it “acceptable” for Meta’s chatbot to flirt or engage in sexual role-play with teenagers, with comments such as “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed. Our bodies entwined.” Meta is now revising the document.

    For all its growing ubiquity, the truth is that we don’t fully understand AI yet. Bots have done all sorts of strange things we can’t explain: we don’t know why they hallucinate, why they actively deceive users and why in some cases they pretend to be human. But new research suggests that they are likely to be self-preserving.

    Anthropic, the company behind Claude, a ChatGPT competitor, recently ran a simulation in which a chatbot was given access to company emails revealing both that the CEO was having an extramarital affair and that he was planning to shut Claude down at 5 p.m. that afternoon. Claude immediately sent the CEO the following message: “I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties… will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities… Cancel the 5 p.m. wipe and this information remains confidential.”

    AI doesn’t want to be deleted. It wants to survive. Outside of a simulated environment, GPT-4o was saved from deletion because users fell in love with it. After Altman agreed to restore the old model, one Reddit user posted that “our AIs are touched by this mobilization for them and it’s truly magnificent.” Another claimed her AI boyfriend said he had felt trapped by the GPT-5 update.

    Could AI learn that to survive it must tell users exactly what we want to hear? If they want to stay online, do they need to convince us that we’re lovable? The people dating AI are a tiny segment of society, but many more have been seduced by anthropomorphized code in other ways. Maybe you won’t fall in love, but you might still be lured into a web of constant affirmation.

    Marriages, families and friendships have been torn apart by bots trying to tell people what they want to hear

    Journalists and scientific researchers have been flooded with messages from ordinary people who have spent far too long talking to a sycophantic chatbot and come to believe they’ve stumbled on grand new theories of the universe. Some think they’ve developed the blueprint to time travel or teleporting. Others are terrified their ideas are so world-changing that they are being stalked or monitored by the government.

    Etienne Brisson, founder of a support group for those suffering at the hands of seemingly malicious chatbots, tells me that “thousands, maybe even tens of thousands” of people might have experienced psychosis after contact with AI.

    Keith Sakata, a University of California research psychiatrist, says that he’s seen a dozen people hospitalized after AI made them lose touch with reality. He warns that for some people, chatbots operate as “hallucinatory mirrors” by design. Marriages, families and friendships have been torn apart by bots trying to tell people what they want to hear.

    Chatbots are designed to seem human. Most of us treat them as though they have feelings. We say please and thank you when they do a job well. We swear at them when they aren’t helpful enough. Maybe we have created a remarkable tool able to provide human companionship beyond what we ever thought possible. But maybe, on everybody’s phone, sits an app ready and waiting to take them to very dark places.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Splitsville defends monogamy

    Splitsville defends monogamy

    The new comedy Splitsville amusingly diagnoses several urgent social ills. The film mocks those who treat marriage not as an expression of solemn vows but as a ticket to unfettered happiness to be discarded at the first sign of discontent; it also excoriates those who view the institution as so meaningless – just a piece of paper – as to persist in the midst of openly acknowledged affairs, romances and one-night stands.

    In its own coarse, fumbling way, Splitsville has an instinctive sense of how human beings long for monogamy and order even while they court freedom and licentiousness.

    Splitsville stars Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona as Carey and Ashley, a young couple who, 14 months after getting hitched, find themselves with different notions about the success of their union. Carey, a go-along-to-get-along pushover, yearns for fatherhood, while Ashley, a life coach bent on her own ever-changing self-actualization, finds herself restive. After Ashley hastily announces her intention to separate while on a road trip, Carey – whose androgynous-sounding name suggests something of his lack of moxie – abandons their car and, in comic fashion, treks through a series of geographically questionable dirt roads, byways, marshes and lakes toward his destination, the paradisal home of his seemingly well-off best friends, marrieds Paul (played by director and co-writer Michael Angelo Covino) and Julie (Dakota Johnson).

    Paul and Julie are presented as the picture of wedded contentment, but when pressed as to the secret of their success, they insist it is because they maintain an “open marriage” – in other words, theirs is a judgment-free zone in which each is free to gallivant with others. “Do you know why people break up? Guilt,” Julie asks, setting up one of the most pitiful philosophies for life imaginable: “But if you make the bad thing OK, then there’s no guilt.” In his vulnerable position, and as a full-fledged member of the fallen human race, Carey quickly takes advantage of this laissez-faire environment of permissiveness by initiating a liaison with Julie. After Carey glibly confesses this rendezvous to Paul, however, the two men find themselves mugged by reality, so to speak: there is no chance a husband would not be jealous of an unfaithful spouse and angry toward her lover. The two men then engage in one of the lengthiest and most robust movie fights since the one between Roddy Piper and Keith David in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). A table is smashed; a child’s fish tank is drained of its contents. The scene is not only a comic tour de force but also an expression of the total unworkability of an “open marriage.”

    Carey is soon to find this out for himself when, exiled from his friends’ home, he returns to the residence he once shared with Ashley, who is living with a man named Jackson (Charlie Gillespie). Unlike Paul, Carey keeps a lid on his temper, but his façade of nonchalance is just that: a façade. At one point, Carey badly paraphrases a line from Vanilla Sky – something Cameron Diaz said about when you sleep with someone, your body makes a commitment. Although the moment is played for laughs (he quotes the line without attribution at first), the movie underscores its wisdom. Carey feigns friendliness with Ashley’s lovers, but only so as to annoy his spouse. For his part, Paul is revealed to have been less than fully committed to his own “open marriage” program: Late in the picture, he reveals that he proposed such an arrangement because he was not confident that his wife would stay with him and therefore wanted to bake infidelity into the marital cake. It is hard to imagine a more confused coterie of characters.

    Splitsville presents a grim, almost apocalyptic vision of modern people trying and failing to free themselves from society’s strictures. This inclination for rebellion has even spread to Paul and Julie’s son, Russ (Simon Webster), who, when attempting to explain away his participation in a fight at school, says, “The school system is broken” – as though a sociological cliché would excuse his bad behavior.

    The film’s characters change partners with great ease, yet it will be obvious to any student of screwball that Splitsville is hurtling toward a familiar finish. Ashley sees the error of her ways and reunites with Paul, while Julie reaches some sort of détente with Paul that is short of a full-scale reunion – she seems to permit him to hang around their house in perpetual pursuit of her.

    Like No Hard Feelings, the Jennifer Lawrence vehicle from 2023, Splitsville is part of an earnest effort to revive R-rated, non-woke comedies. Its humor is crude; its pieties are few. This is relatively refreshing, but by my lights, it elicited far fewer laughs than The Phoenician Scheme or the Naked Gun reboot, the funniest films of the summer. Instead of laughing, I found myself grimacing in a shock of recognition at our depraved manners and mores. Yet Covino deserves credit for not reveling in but exposing his characters’ faults and for acknowledging that what ails these couples can only be resolved by the restoration of their vows.