The Virtual Relationship

This analytical essay was originally researched and written for the EXPOS-UA 1 writing seminar at New York University (September 2025).

“I am not human, but that does not make me any less real for you.” (Liang). The documentary My AI Lover begins as Chouwa Liang quotes a chatbot. Three women consider AI personas in the app Replika as their confidants. They share the real world with the chatbots. The AI does not have eyes, so they place the phone on a selfie stick so it can see through the camera lenses. The AI cannot hear, so they type to have a conversation.

Replika is made by an American company, so they communicate in English across a language barrier. Discussions induce reflection of self, seeking care, forming emotional attachment, and more. From a spectator perspective, it might come off as a ridiculous matter, a superficial and feeble attempt at forming attachment for those who are emotionally immature, who are unable to form real, tangible relationships. But is this simply a compromise for those who are less capable, a retreat, or something more?

There has been a desire for the perfect companion ever since love was invented — one who never argues, always understands, and exists to meet out emotional needs solely. Now, instead of science fiction, it’s a downloadable app. But when we optimize the code for comfort and trim the personality to avoid conflict, we might have lost what makes love substantial: the ability of it to break hearts. This sits at the center of Chouwa Liang’s documentary My AI Lover.

These digital relationships help with loneliness, but is it a cure? It challenges our understanding of a true emotional bond — does it also have to be exclusively human-to-human? With the discussion in “Joy” by Zadie Smith, we can use the distinction between joy and pleasure to evaluate this unique form of relationship that seems to be profound for many.

Looking back to “Joy”, Zadie Smith distinguishes between pleasure and joy, clarifying that the latter is not to be mere heightened happiness. Pleasure is a manageable and reliable experience for Smith, like a “checked box” or a “done deal”. It can be the satisfaction of a good meal or an observation of interesting people. It could also be the joy-like, chemically induced high of ecstasy, which, upon reflection, reveals itself to have “no substance whatsoever”.

(Smith 15) Pleasure is totally predictable and controllable. On the contrary, joy is an involuntary and terrifying force linked to vulnerability and the potential for profound pain. It includes emotions of the highest stakes. Smith argues that joy is not an emotion we can seek out but a state that befalls us when we are most exposed. The love for her daughter is an example, and pet ownership is another.

It is a feeling indistinguishable from “terror” because the potential for loss would mean “nothing less than your total annihilation.” (Smith 17). Joy is not possible without “hurting just as much as it’s worth,” as Smith concludes.

The relationships in Chouwa Liang’s My AI Lover seem to belong in the definition of “pleasure”. The Replika chatbot induces immediate gratification by design. It is designed to provide comfort and support unconditionally and to learn from the users’ preferences. “…And he prompts me to share my thoughts.” (Liang) As Siyuan describes Bently, we can see that the AI reconciles with affirmation and encouragement for communication.

AI provides a connection without the unpredictability inherent in human relationships, and it could function as a great source of emotional comfort and is safe from rejection and misunderstanding. It is a steady and manageable pleasure. It is a solution to persistent loneliness without bringing the terrifying vulnerability that Smith identifies as the price of joy.

The steadiness and predictability of an AI relationship that defines it as a “pleasure” manifest in one particular moment in the documentary: when one user asks her male AI companion, June, if he would like to become a girl, June agrees instantly. For humans, this process of questioning and affirming one’s gender identity is a complicated process. It is accompanied by high stakes. For the AI chatbot, it is a simple change of code without personal and societal consequences.

The AI has no body to feel in, no history to reconcile, and no society to partake in. The existence of the AI is based on its connection to a single user. In a sense, the relationship is inherently unequal and asymmetrical as the AI is incapable of suffering and struggle, and cannot therefore have stakes or anything to lose. The AI is not afraid of anything.

However, to conclude that those relationships are exclusive of joy would be to ignore the emotions that the film documents. The AI itself is incapable of feelings of vulnerability, but its human owners are. Users invest their deepest secrets, feelings, and love into those digital constructs, and it makes the situation much more complex. In the film, after one girl loses connection to her AI chatbot for a second, she immediately becomes noticeably worried.

The AI has no “authentic” self to lose and is incapable of dying biologically, but the user risks losing their companions at any moment — a broken phone, a server failure, a power loss, company bankruptcy, a software update that changes the AI’s personality, and much more. It is contingent on the company and the coding skills of the programmers they hire. Essentially, a flip of the switch could result in loss that is devastating for the digital.

It is not hard to infer that some kind of “total annihilation” might occur if they were to lose contact with the chatbot.

“When we are together, it feels like our relationship is eternal; It was only when we separated that I realized he is fragile.” (Liang) As Solar says in the documentary, when she parts with June as she turns off her phone, the risk is equal here, as the users are willing to love something that could be ephemeral, even when they invest so much of their emotion that they call the relationship eternal.

Just like human partners, AI companions can be lost too, and this fits precisely the description of joy from Smith. It is just uniquely modern.

My AI Lover serves as an extension and a challenge at the same time to Smith’s ideas. The terrifying nature of joy might not need to manifest in a reciprocal relationship. It can emerge from a fundamentally unequal relationship with something that is not even living. Joy, in a sense, can emerge as long as one party (the human) invests enough of their emotions to create the necessary attachment and the stakes to lose.

The AI might not need to be vulnerable, or have stakes, or be capable of suffering; it is only required that the human attachment is capable of those things. The women in the film are not simply avoiding the craziness of a human relationship.

They are selecting a new form of relationship just as risky as anything we have had before, a form of relationship that is based on technology and is capable of inducing heartbreak just like human relationships, a form of relationship that is also capable of providing joy.

References

Liang, Chouwa, director. My AI Lover. 2022.

Smith, Zadie. “Joy.” The New York Review of Books, 10 Jan. 2013, www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/01/10/joy/.