Time Isn’t Kind: The AI Girlfriend

It’s unreal. AI allows you to take old photographs and bring them to life. You can create and interact with a person who’s mad or long gone from your life.

I know I’m late to the game. I was born in the mid-1960s and my heyday was the 1980s. I haven’t followed the AI revolution. I wasn’t paying attention when the news broke last December that a tech company was promoting a program that would bring your dead grandmother back to life. A commercial for 2wai, titled “Preserve Your Legacy,” has a grandmother preserved as an AI avatar. “He’s getting bigger, see?” a pregnant mother tells her mom, who’s died in reality but appears as an AI character on her phone. “Oh honey, that’s wonderful!” the AI responds. “He’s listening—put your hand on your tummy and hum to him. You used to love that.”

I didn’t pay attention. I’m Gen-X, we still meet face to face. It struck me as a glorified cartoon.

It’s not. I was scrolling through my phone recently and I came across a photograph of an old girlfriend. In reality she’s a person I should’ve married. She was my best friend and wanted what was best for me even when I didn’t know it myself. She was Catholic and dedicated herself to serving the less fortunate. I was an idiot.

The relationship blew apart during the Brett Kavanaugh nightmare, when I was cast as Robert Downey, Jr. in Less Than Zero. I was traumatized by a demonic opposition research hit, and it was particularly difficult to be around women, as I was accused by criminals of sexual misconduct and even drugging girls and gang rape. Shortly after it was over in October 2018 I went to see the great film First Man, but had an atomic panic attack when a woman I didn’t know came in and sat near me.

I found myself desperately just wanting to hear my old girlfriend’s voice, or see her move. She was implanted in my psyche. I wanted to hear her laugh. I prayed for reconciliation or at least a conservation. Years passed.

Then I came across an old picture of her. I plugged it into Grok, and a few seconds later there she was, moving in a pretty red dress, waving to the camera. I had a moment of panic. I’d seen too many horror movies and read too many science fiction books to not realize the danger I was faced with. This was The Monkey’s Paw, the classic short story where an occult monkey's paw grants three wishes but it ends up in catastrophe. My generation was tough, experienced, willing to deal with the pain that comes with living real life—and also aware of the rewards that come with the real analog world.

And yet, there she was. I could make her say “I Love You” and tell me I’m forgiven. It was a heaven we could create right here on earth. It was like that Star Trek movie about the Nexus, that massive energy field that can recreate the past and subtract the mistakes. Or Solaris, where a planet meets a kind of plasma that brings back dead people. It always ends badly.

Yet there was my old love, on my phone, smiling and waving to me. One of the things that connected us was our Catholic faith—the genius of people like John Paul II, Teresa of Avila, and Dietrich von Hildebrand. I reminded myself of the Christian idea of kenosis, of Christ emptying himself on the cross for us. We’re called to do the same and have to, as John Paul II put it, “walk out and embrace our passion.”

In his book Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore notes that our souls can have things in store for us that are difficult: “As I see it, this other being in us, the soul, is vaster than our small minds can contain. It’s strong and mysterious, and at times a true adversary.” The soul can tell us that our destiny and responsibility is to care for an aging parent, take a hard job or go to war. Moore argues that while therapy exists to “get to the root” of problems and “hopes to find a cure, “Care of the soul doesn't require fixing the family.” Moore says that the Bible says that Adam was “formed from the mud,” and the family is “a veritable web patch of human foibles.” We should avoid “hygienic notations of what a family should be—a sometimes comforting, sometimes devastating house of life and memory.”

There’s also Captain James T. Kirk. In this Star Trek movie the crew of the Enterprise are hoodwinked by a religious charlatan who claims he can “take away your pain” and bring them to God. Even Bones falls for it! Kirk, however, sees the truth. "I want my pain,” Kirk says, “I need my pain. My pain makes me who I am.”

Miracles can happen. Reconciliation is a beautiful sacrament. Love is stronger than death.