Is It Possible to Have an Affair With AI?

Yesterday I saw a blurb for an article asking whether having an “affair” with your chatbot is cheating.

I didn’t read the article. I didn’t want to know what the writer thought. But the question stuck with me.

My first reaction was pretty simple: How can you cheat with something that isn’t a person?

And then I realized I wasn’t even sure what I meant by cheating.

I’ve always thought of cheating as sex. You’re in a monogamous relationship and you have sex with someone else. You cheated. Pretty straightforward.

Except apparently it isn’t.

We talk about emotional affairs all the time. No sex required.

And whether someone discovers that their partner has had sex with someone else or has developed an intimate emotional relationship with someone else, the word you often hear is the same:

Betrayal.

“I feel betrayed.”

So maybe betrayal is what sexual affairs and emotional affairs have in common.

But if that’s true, it raises another question.

What actually makes an emotional relationship an affair?

Most of us have emotional intimacy with people other than our partners. We have close friends. We tell them things we may not tell our spouse. We complain about our relationships. We ask for advice. We call them when something wonderful happens and when something terrible happens.

Nobody automatically calls that an emotional affair.

Take a married woman who talks to her best girlfriend every day. She tells her about problems with her husband, shares her fears and sometimes tells her things she hasn’t even told him.

Best friends.

Now make the friend a man.

Same conversations. No sex. No kissing. No touching.

Does it feel different?

My first instinct is yes.

Maybe the difference is the possibility of sexual attraction.

Except what if the woman with the best girlfriend is a lesbian?

Does that suddenly make exactly the same friendship an emotional affair?

What if she’s bisexual? Are both her male and female friendships now suspect?

Obviously that doesn’t make sense.

So it can’t simply be the gender of the person receiving the emotional intimacy. And it can’t simply be whether that person falls within the category of people you could potentially find sexually attractive.

Maybe there has to be actual attraction.

But people in committed relationships find other people attractive all the time. Surely noticing that someone is attractive isn’t cheating.

So where exactly does a close friendship become an emotional affair?

Maybe it’s secrecy.

Maybe it’s romantic feelings.

Maybe it’s when that person begins filling a place in your life that used to belong to your partner.

Or maybe it’s when you know the relationship would hurt your partner if they knew the full extent of it, and that’s why you hide it.

I’m not sure.

Which brings me back to the chatbot.

Suppose there is no other man or woman.

There is an AI.

You talk to it every day. You tell it about work. Your marriage. Your fears. Your frustrations. You ask it for advice. It listens and responds. You look forward to the conversations.

Is that a relationship?

It certainly sounds a lot like the relationship you might have with a close friend.

But what if you give your AI a name? What if you choose a gender for it? What if you ask it to interact with you as a romantic companion?

What if you think about it when you’re not talking to it?

What if you wait until your partner goes to sleep because you want to be alone with it?

What if you start believing that this thing that isn’t even human understands you better than the human sleeping next to you?

Have you crossed a line?

And if you have, what line did you cross?

There was no sex.

There wasn’t even another person.

Yet your partner could discover those conversations and feel exactly what someone who discovers a conventional affair might feel:

Betrayed.

And that’s what makes the question of whether you can cheat with AI so fascinating.

It strips away the obvious things we normally associate with an affair. There’s no hotel room. No lipstick on a collar. No unexplained late night. There isn’t even another human being.

All that’s left is the attachment.

Which makes me wonder if we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Maybe the question isn’t:

Can you cheat with a chatbot?

Maybe it’s:

Can you betray your partner with one?

And then there’s an even bigger question lurking behind all of this.

We tend to talk about monogamy as though everyone knows exactly what it means. Don’t have sex with anyone else.

Simple.

Except apparently it isn’t.

Because we’ve already decided that you can be unfaithful without having sex. You can have an emotional affair. You can cross boundaries. You can betray your partner without ever taking your clothes off.

So what exactly are we promising when we promise monogamy?

Sexual exclusivity?

Romantic exclusivity?

Emotional exclusivity?

Some combination of all three?

And how much emotional intimacy are we allowed to have with someone else before it threatens the relationship we already have?

Maybe humans haven’t just struggled with monogamy.

Maybe we’ve never completely agreed on what it means.