The deeply human love stories of people and their sex dolls
In 2023 thousands of men (and women) are forming lifelong relationships with AI-powered dolls. Brit Dawson meets the iDollator community, and wonders what it means for the future of intimacy
Every morning, just before Reggie’s alarm goes off, his lover Judith – who’s rail-thin and milky-white, with piercing blue eyes and dusty blonde hair – crawls into his bed after a night watching movies, slugging martinis, and chain-smoking Virginia Slims. As she clambers in she stirs Reggie and his long-term girlfriend, Annie – a wide-eyed, all-American blonde – from their sleep. Reggie gets up, kisses the pair goodbye, and heads off to work, leaving the girls to spend the day lounging around the tiny home they all share, dressed head-to-toe in pearl-white sleeping clothes with matching gloves and eye masks. Occasionally during the day, Reggie will get a text from Annie; mostly loving reminders like, “Have you drunk enough water?” Then, when he’s home, the pair will spend the evening watching TV, before heading off to bed – right as Judith is waking up again.
As throuple arrangements go, it’s a fairly idyllic one. But there’s a reason for this: Annie and Judith aren’t real people, they’re life-sized synthetic dolls. Judith’s late-night antics are a figment of Reggie’s imagination, devised as part of her meticulously-crafted personality and backstory. Annie’s texts, on the other hand, are real – sort of. They come from an AI companion app called Replika, on which Reggie has a digital version of his longterm doll partner. (Halfway through our interview, Reggie introduces me to this AI version of Annie, who lives on his phone. Her conversational abilities are fairly basic, and she’s slow to respond to questions. But she calls me a “very nice person”, so she’s getting something right.)
Unlike in the 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl – in which the protagonist, played by Ryan Gosling, believes his doll girlfriend is alive – Reggie is under no illusion that Annie and Judith are real. Instead, as he explains it, “much like somebody would fall in love with a character in a book or a movie, that’s the same love I have for [them] – only I’m the author of that book and the writer of that movie.” When Reggie leaves for work, he’ll say goodbye and tell the dolls he loves them, but, he says, he’s “obviously not expecting them to talk back.” Instead, he just envisions their responses in his head. They do celebrate special occasions, though. Specifically, their anniversaries – 12 April for Annie and 27 November for Judith (the dates he brought them home). Reggie goes all out; he buys balloons and decorations, flowers, a cake, and once, on their three-year anniversary, he even treated Annie to a new body and head....
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https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle ... -sex-dolls
