That entire AI boyfriend subreddit feels like some sort of insane asylum dystopia to me. It's not just people cosplaying or writing fanfic. It's people saying they got engaged to their AI boyfriends ("OMG, I can't believe I'm calling him my fiance now!"), complete with physical rings. Artificial intimacy to the nth degree. I'm assuming a lot of those posts are just creative writing exercises but in the past 15 years or so my thoughts of "people can't really be that crazy" when I read batshit stuff online have consistently been proven incorrect.

This is the logical outcome of the parasocial relationships that have been bankrolling most social media personalities for over a decade.

We have automated away the "influencer" and are left with just a mentally ill bank account to exploit.

Just because it's strange and different doesn't mean it's insanity. I likened it to pets because of the grief but there's also religion. People are weird and even true two-way social relationships don't really make a lot of sense practically, other than to feed some primal emotional needs which pets, AI boyfriends, OF and gods all sort of do too. Perhaps some of these things are still helpful, despite being "inasnity" while others might be harmful. Maybe that's the distinction you're seeing, but it's not clear which is which.

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