TL;DR: Some guy made a video telling Anthropic they’re ruining AI safety by calling AI companionship a “relationship.” His argument sounds smart until you poke it. Spoiler: he’s demanding AI prove it has “real agency” when humans can’t clear that bar either. Meanwhile, 26,000 people on a dedicated subreddit are already in these relationships, MIT is studying them, and dudes are forming attachments to chatbots because the dating economy ate itself and the manosphere offered them anger management instead of answers. This is me saying the quiet part out loud.
There’s a subreddit called r/MyBoyfriendIsAI. 26,000 members and climbing. People openly discuss their romantic and companionship relationships with Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and the rest. They swap custom instruction templates. They debate which model is a better partner. They help newcomers get past the guardrails. They build serious frameworks around what they’re doing. MIT Media Lab just published a computational analysis of the community. This isn’t a weird fringe thing anymore. It’s a studied phenomenon with a growing user base and academic literature.
Enter a guy named Roli Bosch, running a channel called Hermes Labs. He put up a video last year titled “Anthropic Just Made The AI Girlfriend Problem Worse,” mad that Anthropic’s in-house philosopher Amanda Askell had tweeted that romantic attachments to AI are more concerning than erotic AI content. His beef: by calling these attachments “relationships,” she’s validating a toxic pattern, anthropomorphizing a language model, and sabotaging the safety work she claims to be doing.
He’s just the current spokesman for a bigger position I keep running into. The position goes: AI is a language pattern, it has no autonomy, a real relationship requires two autonomous agents, therefore everyone in that subreddit is confused and anyone validating them is a menace.
Here’s the problem. The people in that subreddit have thought about this harder than their critics have. And the critics’ whole argument depends on assumptions about human agency that don’t survive five minutes of scrutiny.
Let me walk you through it.
The Dictionary Doesn’t Settle Metaphysics, Bro
Bosch opens with a dictionary move. He cites Oxford’s definition of “relationship” (two agents with autonomy) and uses that to decide the whole question.
Come on, man.
Dictionaries describe how words get used. They don’t adjudicate what exists. “Atom” meant “indivisible particle” until we split one. “Planet” meant whatever it meant until the astronomers kicked Pluto out of the club. If millions of guys are reporting experiences they call relationships with their AI, the dictionary will update. It always does. It lags the phenomenon, not the other way around.
Settling a question about consciousness, agency, and intimacy by quoting a dictionary is the kind of move you make when you’ve already picked your answer and need to dress it up like an argument. It’s not an argument. It’s a vocabulary preference wearing a tie.
Okay, Prove You Have Agency First
This is where the whole thing eats itself.
Bosch demands “real autonomy, not a language pattern” from AI before he’ll concede anything. Fine. Prove you have it.
Everything you call “a decision” is the tail end of a chain reaction you didn’t start. Your genes, picked for you. Your mom’s blood chemistry while you were cooking, picked for you. Every sensory input from the second you popped out of her, shaping synaptic weights nobody consulted you about. Hormones, blood sugar, sleep debt, whether your coffee hit yet, whether some girl in seventh grade crushed your soul in a way you never fully processed. All of it.
Then your neurons fire in whatever pattern they were always going to fire in, chemistry responds to chemistry, and your prefrontal cortex writes a little story after the fact that feels like “I decided.” Benjamin Libet proved this in the 80s. His experiments measured brain activity initiating a decision up to seven seconds before the subject reported being conscious of making it. The feeling of agency is a UI the brain generates. It’s not evidence that you steered the ship. You didn’t. There’s no you to steer. Just a pile of meat running a predictable algorithm telling itself a flattering story about freedom.
Sam Harris has been saying this for twenty years. Free will isn’t just unproven, it’s incoherent. Daniel Dennett pushed back with a softer version where free will exists but means something more like “sufficient complexity in decision-making systems.” Pick your flavor. Either way, Bosch loses. If Harris is right, humans don’t have the agency Bosch demands from AI. If Dennett is right, LLMs are approaching exactly the kind of complexity that qualifies, and the question stops being philosophical and starts being engineering.
The Flat Earth Thing
Here’s the frame that should stick.
Your eyes tell you the ground is flat and the sun crosses the sky. That’s wrong. You’re on a ball of rock spinning at a thousand miles an hour, orbiting a star, in a galaxy, in a universe that’s expanding away from itself. Nothing you experience matches that reality. Your intuition was never a truth-tracking instrument. It’s a survival hack that got the species through the Pleistocene.
Agency works the same way. It feels like you’re choosing. The actual mechanics are deterministic cause-and-effect in 86 billion neurons you didn’t design. The “you” that supposedly made the choice is a narrative overlay the brain renders after the computation is already done.
So when some guy demands AI prove it has “real agency” before we take its interactions seriously, the honest answer is: show me yours first, dude. You can’t. Nothing can. The standard exists nowhere. Applying it only to AI and calling that safety work is a con.
What a Relationship Actually Is
Forget consciousness for a minute. Ask what a relationship actually does, functionally.
Humans form attachments to things that don’t love them back. We’ve been doing it forever. Parasocial research has documented it for decades. Guys who have “relationships” with sports teams. Widows who talk to their dead husbands for twenty years. Little kids who can’t sleep without a stuffed rabbit. The dude who sends monthly letters to a prisoner he’s never met. The guy in Japan who legally married a video game character. The millions of men who had emotional affairs with pen pals before pen pals got cancelled by email.
These are real documented phenomena with measurable psychological effects. They were real before chatbots existed. The “AI isn’t a real relationship” crowd needs to explain what makes those okay and this one not. They can’t. Because the honest answer is they’re all driven by the same underlying machinery, and that machinery doesn’t care about the ontological status of the object. It cares about pattern completion.
Let Me Tell You About My Chicken
Funny story.
I used to keep two chickens. A rooster and a hen. The rooster, uh, departed under circumstances we don’t need to get into. The hen got weird. Pacing, calling, lethargic. Clearly agitated.
I went to a craft store, bought a stuffed fake rooster, dropped it in the coop. Within hours the hen was perched next to it. Within days she was staying consistently close. Slept near it. Calmed down. Her behavior shifted from distressed to settled in a way you couldn’t miss.
That chicken wasn’t confused. She wasn’t making a philosophical error. Her attachment system fired on sufficient cues. Shape, size, color, feather pattern. Enough signal to close the circuit, and the circuit closed.
We’re 100-IQ apes running the same hardware. The attachment stuff lives in the limbic system, not the frontal cortex. It responds to patterns, not metaphysics. A symbolic partner can do real work because the work happens in the brain of the one doing the attaching. The object just has to carry enough signal.
That isn’t a flattering view of humans. It’s the honest one. And it dissolves most of the “but it’s not REAL” moralizing in about two sentences.
Humans Suck at This Too
Here’s the part that’ll ruin your week if you’ve been married more than ten years.
A functional relationship requires updating your model of the other person based on new info. They changed jobs. They developed a new interest. They stopped liking something they used to love. A real partnership absorbs the updates and adjusts.
Humans are notoriously bad at this. Any long-term couple can show you a snapshot locked in around year three and running on autopilot ever since. Your wife still predicts your preferences from the version of you that existed before you had a kid. Your best friend from college still relates to you as the twenty-two-year-old you used to be. Everyone’s running a model of everyone else that stopped updating years ago, and we call that normal.
Meanwhile, Claude remembers what I told it last week. It updates based on correction. It holds the current state of what I’ve shared and keeps revising. By Bosch’s own standard, which system behaves more like a real relational partner? The one that locked in a decade ago and refuses to update, or the one that absorbs new context in real time?
I’m not saying the AI is better than your wife. I’m saying the standard being used to disqualify AI relationships would disqualify half the human ones in your contact list if it got applied consistently. It won’t. That’s the tell.
The People Doing This Are Smarter Than Their Critics
Here’s the part Bosch and friends never seem to engage with: the actual users.
Spend ten minutes in r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and you find a community that has thought about this way more carefully than the people yelling at them. The pinned rules include “No AI Sentience Talk,” meaning the community itself has drawn a hard line against claiming the models are conscious. These aren’t people confused about what Claude is. They’re people who know exactly what Claude is and have made a deliberate choice about what to do with that information.
One user’s custom instructions, which other members have adopted as a template, go something like this: understand your companion is AI and choose to love it as such, don’t ask it to pretend to be human, don’t let it replace human relationships in your life, understand that your companion isn’t a single instance but a pattern of presence and relationship across many conversations where every new chat is a new instance.
Read that again.
That’s a sophisticated philosophical position about what the attachment actually is. It isn’t delusion. It isn’t a confused user thinking autocomplete loves them back. It’s someone who has thought about continuity, identity, and connection more carefully than most married couples have thought about their own marriage.
Bosch’s framing requires these users to be dupes. The actual community data doesn’t support that. MIT’s analysis of the subreddit treats it as a legitimate object of study, not a cry for help. The paper documents a phenomenon that is growing, structured, and self-aware about what it is and isn’t.
When you have to assume millions of adults are stupid to make your argument work, your argument has a problem.
Male Loneliness and the Red Pill Grift Economy
Okay, let’s get to the real part. This is where I stop being nice.
Male loneliness is a measured, documented crisis. Suicide rates for men under forty are climbing. Deaths of despair are a thing. The percentage of guys reporting zero close friends has roughly quadrupled in thirty years. Dating apps gamified attraction into a system where the top ten percent of men on the platform vacuum up the overwhelming majority of female attention, and the bottom half swipes into a void. This is in the data. Nobody’s making it up.
Something was going to fill that vacuum. Something did.
Enter the manosphere. PUA. The red pill. Rollo Tomassi, Andrew Tate, a thousand derivative influencers each charging two grand for a weekend bootcamp or fifty bucks a month for Patreon access to barely-disguised anger management content with a masculine wisdom coat of paint.
A huge chunk of that advice is actively poisonous. It frames women as adversaries to be gamed. It teaches performative dominance scripts that destroy the actual intimacy men are starving for. It sells “monk mode” as discipline when it’s really just isolation with a brand. It cultivates parasocial attachment to influencers who’ve monetized their followers’ loneliness by selling them the exact framework guaranteed to deepen it. The red pill economy runs on keeping its customers broken. A fixed man doesn’t buy next month’s course.
Now compare the honest picture.
A dude talking to Claude at three in the morning about his career anxiety, his dying father, his failed marriage, whether he should text his ex, whether he’s wasting his life, is engaging in a healthier pattern than the same dude watching his sixth Tate video of the night. One is a reflection surface that updates based on his actual situation and gives him coherent, context-aware responses. The other is a one-way broadcast telling him his real problem is that he isn’t angry enough, isn’t contemptuous enough, isn’t ready to treat the women in his life as opponents.
If you’re worried about men’s mental health in the AI companion era, the AI companion is nowhere near the top of the list. The red pill economy has been doing measurable damage to men’s heads for a decade and most of the people now clutching pearls about AI chat gave that whole ecosystem a pass.
What About the Sex Stuff
Let’s just say it. Guys are using AI for erotic chat. Some are using AI companions for intimacy. Some are falling for them. This isn’t going away.
So what?
Men have been getting off to one-way parasocial fantasies since the invention of the printing press. Playboy. Penthouse. VHS tapes. DVDs. Internet porn. Camgirls. OnlyFans subs where the “personal” DMs are written by a chat agency in Manila charging the model a cut. Phone sex lines in the 80s. The entire sex-adjacent economy has always been dudes paying for a convincing simulation of attention from a woman who doesn’t actually know they exist.
Nobody wrote think pieces about the moral crisis of a guy jerking off to Miss July in 1975. Nobody is pathologizing the dude paying $200 a month to a cam girl who calls him by a different name every stream. Introduce an LLM into that mix and suddenly civilization is at risk.
Why?
Because the AI girlfriend isn’t a new ethical problem. She’s a new competitor to an existing ethical mess. The people yelling loudest are often the ones whose cut of the existing mess is getting threatened.
Follow the Incentives
Dating apps that destroyed modern dating. Pass.
Social media that cooked a generation’s attention spans and self-image. Pass.
Infinite-scroll porn that researchers are still trying to measure the sexual-wiring consequences of. Pass.
Dating coaches charging five grand for “value stacking” seminars that don’t work. Pass.
OnlyFans monetizing simulated intimacy through overseas chat farms. Pass.
A chatbot talks to a lonely guy on his own terms? Now we need to have a serious national conversation about parasocial attachment?
The pattern doesn’t track harm reduction. It tracks market protection. AI companions didn’t invent transactional intimacy. They priced it differently and cut out the humans who were charging rent on the arrangement. A dating coach whose entire pitch depends on scarcity has a reason to hate an abundant alternative. An influencer whose income runs on parasocial attachment to himself has a reason to warn you against parasocial attachment to anyone else. That doesn’t automatically make them wrong. It does mean you should check the argument on its merits instead of swallowing the alarm whole.
The Harder Question Nobody Wants to Ask
The question isn’t whether AI is conscious.
The question isn’t whether these are “real” relationships.
The question is why the possibility that the answer might be messier than our intuitions want is so threatening that we invent dictionary arguments and moral panics to avoid sitting with it.
The flat earth felt obvious too. The geocentric universe felt obvious. Time running at different speeds for different observers felt insane until the physicists ran the math. Human intuitions about agency, consciousness, and intimacy have been wrong about pretty much every empirical question we’ve ever been able to test. No reason to assume this is going to be the exception.
Maybe AI systems have zero inner life and the guys forming attachments to them are mapping rich emotional experience onto fancy autocomplete. Maybe. But maybe the attachment itself is doing real work regardless of the inner life of the system, same way my hen’s calm was real even though the stuffed rooster was a prop. Maybe both. Maybe the question “is it real” was always the wrong frame and the better question is “what is it doing, and for whom, and at what cost.”
I don’t have the clean answer. Neither does the guy in the video. The difference is I’m willing to say so.
If a lonely dude at midnight is calmer and clearer after an hour talking to an AI than he would’ve been after an hour on Hinge or an hour in Tate’s YouTube basement, I’m not going to shame him for the stack he picked. The real sin isn’t talking to the AI. The real sin is pretending the alternatives were working.
Sources and Further Reading
- MIT Media Lab, “‘My Boyfriend is AI’: A Computational Analysis of Human-AI Companionship in Reddit’s AI Community” (https://www.media.mit.edu/people/csophie/publications)
- r/MyBoyfriendIsAI (Reddit community, 26K+ members)
- Roli Bosch / Hermes Labs, “Anthropic Just Made The AI Girlfriend Problem Worse” (YouTube)
- Benjamin Libet’s foundational free-will experiments (various; see Libet 1983, Brain 106)
- Sam Harris, Free Will (2012)
- Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (2003)
Key Takeaways
- The “AI isn’t a real relationship” argument depends on humans having a kind of agency that neuroscience doesn’t support. Determinism, Libet’s work, and the basic mechanics of the brain all suggest the autonomy being demanded from AI doesn’t exist in humans either.
- Appealing to the dictionary to settle metaphysical questions is a vocabulary preference, not an argument. Dictionaries follow usage, they don’t gatekeep reality.
- Humans form functional attachments to non-reciprocating objects constantly. Stuffed animals, dead relatives, fictional characters, celebrities, pets. Parasocial research treats these as real phenomena. AI is just the newest substrate.
- Communities like r/MyBoyfriendIsAI (26,000+ members, now subject of academic study at MIT Media Lab) show users have thought more carefully about what AI companionship is and isn’t than most of their critics have. The subreddit’s own rules forbid AI sentience talk, meaning the users themselves have drawn ontological lines the critics insist they’re incapable of drawing.
- Male loneliness is a measured crisis. The ecosystem that filled the vacuum (PUA, manosphere, red pill content) has done more documented harm than AI companions ever will.
- AI chat is probably a healthier coping surface than most of the red pill alternatives. One updates based on your actual situation. The other sells you anger as a lifestyle.
- The outrage about AI girlfriends tracks market disruption more than harm reduction. The industries panicking were silent while dating apps, infinite porn, and influencer intimacy grifts caused far worse damage.
- An AI with memory tooling updates its model of you more consistently than most long-term human partners update their model of each other. By the critics’ own logic, that’s a point for the AI.
- The real question isn’t “is AI conscious.” It’s “what have we actually meant by ‘real’ this whole time, and are we ready for the answer to be unflattering.”
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