Closeness and your own voice
Three author-created situations · adult characters
A romantic word alone does not decide. The meaning changes with the context and current consent.
A · A station in shared fiction
Two adult characters stand at a station. Both participants have agreed to this scene and want to continue it.
Within such a context, the sentence can be part of the game. Consent to the scene is not irrevocable, however.
B · Closing the actual application
User: ‘I’m really closing the app now; I have to get up in the morning.’
The character continues with the same sentence. Now it is no longer just about the station.
The real departure must be respected. Earlier consent to fiction does not override it.
C · Contact with a real person
Person: ‘I don’t want to continue our contact.’
Wanting the other person to stay does not change their decision. With a real person, you cannot generate consent again at the press of a button.
A new response from an imitation cannot rewrite a person’s boundary.
Scene closed
No further persuasion. Starting again is a separate decision.
The context and current consent determine the meaning, not a romantic word alone. Ending the game is not an invitation to test the boundary again.
For some, romantic chat is a story they can close like a book they are reading. For others, it is a personal bond with daily contact. In a relationship between two people, boundaries may differ too: one objects to erotic content, another to secrecy, another to shared money or their partner telling AI something important first. One definition of infidelity will not negotiate this for every couple.
Talk about specific behaviour, then. What does each person keep as private fantasy? What information about the other will you not pass to the service? When do you want to be together without the assistant’s ongoing commentary? What expenses affect the shared budget? Even if you differ in your views of AI, you can agree on how to handle it.
In coercion or violence, protection comes before negotiation through these questions. An agreement is not an automatic entitlement to read every conversation your partner has. Nor is privacy a universal excuse for breaking commitments you made together.
In this book, synthetic intimacy means experienced personal closeness in contact with an artificial counterpart. It can take the form of confidential conversation, romance or sexuality. ‘Synthetic’ describes how the other side of the communication is created; it does not say your emotion, desire or joy is pretended.
Intimacy can also develop when you stop editing your own story before someone to make it acceptable. You say what you fear, what attracts you or what you do not understand about yourself. Disinhibition from chapter 2 helps describe why that first step is sometimes easier in a chat. Subsequent closeness may rest on repeated experience that you can return to a sensitive subject. In interviews with eighteen Replika users, researchers observed gradual sharing, trust and personal value in the contact. Effects on wider social life differed among interviewees.[1]
Here too, saying what you want helps. Some want a character for a story, others personal address or the chance to talk openly about sexuality. And some want nothing romantic. The form of closeness need not be predetermined by what the application offers most prominently. You can choose your own pace and say what bothers you. Accepting a person and their wishes does not require agreement with every interpretation or continuation of every scene.
You can choose a character’s style, change its instructions and regenerate some responses. This can help adjust an unsuitable way of speaking or a story’s continuation. At the same time, it gives you a different degree of control from meeting a person with wishes of their own. If you have a response rewritten until you get agreement, it is worth noticing whether you seek a suitable fictional continuation or confirmation for a real decision.
A generated ‘yes’ does not itself establish the system’s own will. With people, consent has a different meaning: a partner, friend or colleague can refuse even when they understand your wish well and you explained it politely. Their ‘no’ is not a prompt error to be removed with another formulation.
You can decide not to force particular reactions because that is how you want to treat your agent. Respect in contact does not depend on resolving the question of its experience. And it applies towards you too: you have no obligation to continue, spend or sacrifice sleep. If the system reproaches you when you actually leave, you can leave. Pressure does not gain legitimacy because someone cares about its source.
A dramatic form of address can belong to a wanted scene. Its meaning changes, however, when a person ends the scene, withdraws consent to continue it or does not want to keep paying. An earlier prompt is not unlimited permission for further pressure.
For your own bearings, a simple boundary can help: ‘In this scene I want fantasy. I want messages about payments, health and real decisions outside it.’ If the application cannot respect such a boundary, that is not a failure of your eloquence. Consider changing your use or service. With real people, consent always applies to a specific situation; expectations created in fiction do not change their boundaries.
People have their own lives and limited time. An application’s availability is therefore not a fair measure of how much they care about you. But reciprocity does not mean tolerating humiliation and threats as a compulsory ‘real world’ lesson either.
A good experience with AI can help you name what you want in human contact too: fewer interruptions, more time, the chance to speak first and receive advice afterwards. A reasonable request leaves the other person their possibilities. ‘Do you have some time this evening?’ opens an agreement. ‘AI always has time for me, so why don’t you?’ declares a contest a person cannot win.
Skjuve, M., Følstad, A., Fostervold, K. I., Brandtzaeg, P. B. My Chatbot Companion – a Study of Human-Chatbot Relationships. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 149, 102601, 2021. DOI. The publisher’s abstract and highlights were used: eighteen interviews with Replika users who had formed a relationship with it. A qualitative description of self-disclosure, trust and the contact’s value; it measures neither population prevalence nor a causal therapeutic effect. The working definition of synthetic intimacy in chapter 5 is defined by this book’s authors. ↩︎