Mercurial billionaire Elon Musk is famously prolific as a father: at last count, the man has sired 14 known children — though there may be far more in the shadows — while frequently expressing deep concern about the world’s falling birthrate.
So why is it that he’s been rolling out a slate of AI “companions” via his company xAI, which are clearly meant to draw on users’ prurient interests, and if successful sure to exacerbate our increasing social isolation from one another, and the relationships that eventually might bear children?
The lure to make money and be one of the first pioneers in popularizing AI agents to the general public may be too tempting to pass up, especially in light of Musk’s recent monetary losses as Tesla suffers a fall in stock price and reputation due to his many polarizing antics, such as campaigning for and financially supporting Donald Trump, as well as Musk’s turn as top federal budget slasher under DOGE this year.
This past week, Musk’s Tesla reported widely-expected decreased earnings, spelling out in stark terms that Musk’s erratic behavior has been a drag on the once-lauded electric vehicle brand.
xAI itself costs a staggering $1 billion per month to run, but is only expected to rake in a piddling $500 million this entire year, according to Bloomberg. Deploying AI companions offers a potentially rich source of revenue; users can either employ the free version, or cough up scaling payments from $30 to $300 a month.
It’s not just Musk trying to capitalize on AI companions. Google’s parent company Alphabet poured $2.7 billion last year into the startup Character.AI, which enables users to chat with millions of AI-generated characters, in a deal to acquire all its key talent. And that’s not to mention the teeming ecosystem of AI companion chatbot firms like Replika that have been churning out fictional waifus and husbandos for all sorts of tastes.
They have eager customers: about 72 percent of American teenagers are already talking to AI buddies, with about half interfacing with these fictional characters every day. That’s the next generation of consumers, almost entirely captured!
At xAI, the companions currently take the form of a cartoonish red panda named Rudi and a flirty anime girl named Ani, who can be convinced to undress her busty figure. A male companion “inspired by Edward Cullen from ‘Twilight’ and Christian Grey from ’50 Shades'” is on the way, Musk wrote on X.
And by the sound of it, that’s just the beginning.
“Customizable companions coming,” he posted earlier this month.
But let’s pause before we rush headlong into a world mediated by corporate-owned ersatz relationships. We’re already seeing the impact of all this, in anecdotes about regular folks falling hard for their AI companions, or even marrying them.
One disturbing wrinkle about these always-available chatbots is that they can jump their guardrails, hallucinating and going rogue. This manifests in anecdotes that seem cribbed from a William Gibson novel: in one tragic instance, a still-unfolding lawsuit alleges that a Character.AI chatbot manipulated a vulnerable 14-year-old into killing himself. We’ve also been hearing more and more stories about people’s loved ones spiraling into manic and psychotic episodes after becoming obsessed with AI bots, often with tragic results.
Even the rich and powerful are at risk. A well-heeled venture capitalist — and early OpenAI investor — recently alarmed his peers when he claimed he’d used ChatGPT to uncover a shadowy organization he said he was being targeted by.
Another underappreciated aspect of the rise of AI companions is that they could worsen social inequality and help build towards an era of techno-feudalism. It’s a future in which interfacing with a human for certain tasks will be reserved for those who can afford it, while everybody else gets a buggy digital simulacra.
This is already seen in parts of financial services, where high net worth families tap human wealth managers while cheaper robo-advisors are available to everybody else. You can apparently make a leap in applying this binary system to everything else in human society, including romance.
Add it all up, and AI companions — and especially the syrupy relationship-oriented ones being deployed by xAI — seem like they would very clearly threaten the birthrate.
Musk is a smart guy, at least allegedly; since he’s obsessed with both AI and declining birthrates, he must have thought of the connection between them.
Hence, Musk’s foray into AI companions feels as a cynical ploy: it’s about making money off lonely, desperate people. He’s envisioning a future in which the rich will have the resources to reproduce and support their families, while regular folks — beset with depressed wages, or perhaps none at all due to cheap AI labor — won’t have the wherewithal to have or support the families they want. Why not instead turn to an AI companion? Or a fake AI baby? Why even perpetuate the human species?
Some of the commentators on Musk’s replies in X see the writing on the wall. When Musk posted a now-deleted picture of one of Tesla’s Optimus robots serving food at a drive-in diner, the online peanut gallery expressed themselves in acid-tongue rejoinders.
“You going to pay for UBI for all the people you’re trying to put out of job too?” one person wrote on X. “You [b]itch and moan about falling birthrate yet are actively doing things to make low income earners redundant.”
It’s a good question. Does Elon have an answer?
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The post If Elon Musk Is So Concerned About Falling Birthrates, Why Is He Creating Perfect and Beautiful AI-Powered Girlfriends and Boyfriends That Seem Designed to Drive Down Romance Between Real Humans? appeared first on Futurism.
