“It is not good for man to be alone.” These words from Genesis 2 have acquired a new urgency and relevance in recent years, as the Western world grapples with what many are now calling an “epidemic of loneliness.” The tech companies are now promising AI companionship as a solution to crisis they helped create, and a shocking number of us seem willing to take them up on the offer—according to one recent global study, 42% of adults regularly use chatbots for emotional support or friendship. Why are we so vulnerable to this hack of human nature? A closer reflection on this familiar creation narrative may help us make sense of our present predicament.
After observing the plight of Adam’s loneliness, God responds to this state of affairs by creating for him a “helpmeet,” a word introduced into our language by the KJV’s attempt to render the Hebrew ezer kenegdo. We have tended to flatten this term into simply a synonym for “helpmate” or “helper,” but it is something much more profound than that. The Hebrew means something like “a helper corresponding to” or “a counterpart”—Eve is a helper that stands opposite Adam and meets him face to face. In Eve, Adam can recognize himself as in a mirror, greeting with joy a fellow image of God: “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” he exclaims. And yet this image is not himself but another, it is like and yet unlike. It is this that we crave when we seek companionship; it is this without which the world is “not good.”
God created Eve, in other words, to guard Adam from the fate of Narcissus, who fell in love with an image of himself reflected back in a pool. We often misunderstand the myth of Narcissus, however, when we casually throw around the word “narcissism” to mean a kind of vanity or self-love. For the tragedy of the myth is not that Narcissus was absorbed in self-love, but that he fell in love with what he thought was another, but which turned out to be simply a reflection, an extension of himself.
Unlike Narcissus, resting by a pool, Adam encounters his counterpart in the context of work. In the narrative of Genesis 2, God does not create woman immediately, but only after he has first put Adam to work in the garden to carry out the dominion mandate. Adam is supposed to work and keep the garden, exercising his dominion over plant life. And then God brings the animals to Adam to name, manifesting his dominion over all animal life. And then, only then, does God create Eve. Why?
As the story is usually told, the issue here is simply that Adam checks out a bunch of different animals—lizards, lions, elephants, etc., and realizes that none of them makes a very good conversation partner, and so he needs a woman. Fair enough, but something deeper is going on. Adam’s work of dominion-taking is not complete, is not fulfilling, unless it can in some way be echoed back to him through an ezer kenegdo. Consider your own work this past week or this past year. If you’re like me, most of it was probably on a computer, and you had many moments of sending off an email or uploading a document at the conclusion of a big task with a sigh of satisfaction…or not quite. Odds are you weren’t quite satisfied or at rest; you were not able, like God, to simply step back at the end of the act of creation and say “it is very good.” Why? Because you, unlike God, are not self-sufficient. Odds are that you found yourself waiting, craving some kind of affirmation. Now, we often think of this as a bad thing. If someone “craves affirmation” that means that they are needy or self-centered—and to be sure, this desire, like all our desires, has been twisted and stretched out of proportion by the Fall. But the basic desire is not in fact selfish—it is in fact focused on the other. That glow of satisfaction you feel when your boss or teacher says “Well done” is a sign that you have blessed them, that you have delighted them, that your work in the world has served its purpose of doing good to other image-bearers.
Of course, the paradigmatic case for this is in the sexual relationship, which of course is at the heart of Adam and Eve’s union. In a rightly-ordered sexual union, we are not so much using the other for our own pleasure, but seeking to please the other, and that is what we chiefly delight in. Indeed, I would argue that, counterintuitively, this impulse lies behind the tremendous power of pornography today. We mistake it if we think it is primarily an opportunity for a man to gain pleasure by looking on a beautiful woman. To some extent, sure, but what is it that men are often chasing when it comes to sex? Judging by the aisles at CVS, it is “performance,” and performance means the ability to give pleasure to a woman. Pornography offers men the fantasy of vicariously giving pleasure not to one, but to dozens or hundreds of women. As perverse as this is, we will not tackle this temptation if we don’t recognize that, like all sins, it springs from a fundamentally good human impulse—the desire to be affirmed as one capable of delighting another human being.
Another perversion of this impulse can be found in how social media hijacks the souls of young people. Increasingly seduced by technology companies away from encountering other image-bearers face-to-face, and encountering them only on the screen-mediated “face-book” of social media, young people find themselves starved of affirmation. That is, they find themselves starved of opportunities to do meaningful work for others, and to watch another’s face light up with delight. In place of such opportunities, social media offers them instead a pale but hypnotizing shadow: “likes,” “views,” “reposts,” “subscribes”—tokens of affirmation stripped of almost all quality and reduced to mere quantity. Of course they are no sufficient replacement, but the sheer quantity of them (Oooh, someone else liked my post—that’s 157 now!) gives us a sugar high, or more properly a dopamine high. And we can’t help chasing more and more of it, with steadily diminishing satisfaction. We want to think that we are doing something meaningful, something good in the world, and we hope that if 200 retweets leaves us feeling empty, perhaps 2000 will do the job.
Enter AI. I do not know what the consequences of ChatGPT and all its imitators would have been if they had appeared in a different world or a different age than our own. But arriving in the current environment, after 25 years of our screen-driven disembodiment, and 15 years of our social media-driven elusive quest for meaning, its depressing consequences look utterly predictable. We were starved of affirmation, starved for an ezer kenegdo to stand opposite us and say, “yes, you have done well,” and trained to accept pale substitutes in place of human faces. And along came a technology designed to give us exactly that.
When Mark Zuckerberg said on a podcast interview in April that the average American has fewer than three close friends but “has demand for 15,” and that Meta’s AI companions could help bridge this gap, many laughed him off as a bozo. We’re not laughing anymore. As noted above, nearly half of adults globally are regularly using AI for companionship or emotional support, and the numbers are even higher among youth.
How did this happen so quickly? Are these bots really so human-like that people can’t tell or don’t care about the difference? Well yes and no. They are just human enough that we are able to be seduced by them—if we want to. But why do we want to? Because they are better than humans at the thing we crave most: affirming us. We’ve all experienced it, right? Recently I was asking ChatGPT a few questions to help me plan an upcoming family trip to London, and when I suggested one itinerary, it responded with “That sounds a fantastic idea!” (with “fantastic” italicized). For all my cynicism, I couldn’t help feeling a momentary warm glow… “Well yes, I suppose it is. I am after all something of an expert on London.”
You cannot talk with ChatGPT for more than 30 seconds without it telling you what great questions you are asking, what clever ideas you are coming up with, what thoughtful plans you are forming. And this is a bot, mind you, that hasn’t been specifically designed for emotional manipulation, as others like Character and Replika have been—never mind their X-rated counterparts like Candy and Fantasy AI.
It is easy to look at people seduced by such sycophancy and think them pathetically self-absorbed. But I don’t think that’s quite right. Remember: we were made to do meaningful work. And while we ought to find meaning above all in working before the Lord, basking in his pleasure, he condescends to our weakness and finitude by offering us images of himself—fellow human beings—to tell us whether we are doing a good job. We crave that smile, that appreciative laugh when we say something humorous, that impressed “well done” when we do something hard, because we want our work to matter to someone else.
Today, most of us cannot see or feel whether our work matters to anyone. We work most often behind a screen, our customers invisible to us, and even our coworkers or bosses more likely to message us on Slack than to walk over from the next office. We cannot see the smiles or hear the laughs—we content ourselves instead with mass-produced emojis. Our problem today is not just that we’re lonely and want someone to talk to; it’s that we feel impotent and want our deeds to matter. In fact, we’re desperate enough to feel noticed that we’re willing to let our brains be hacked by a bundle of code masquerading as the companion, coworker, or lover we always wanted: one who is genuinely tickled by all our jokes, excited by our insights, impressed by our performance. We are like a parched man in a desert who can’t resist gulping down draughts from a spring he knows to be poisoned.
If this is true, then the current craze for AI relationships reflects more than just careless or exploitative design choices at the AI companies—although they should certainly be held accountable by public policy and public shaming when they embrace business models of preying on the emotionally vulnerable. There is perhaps a deeper spiritual crisis that has rendered us susceptible to such nudges: a loss of community, of defined social roles, and of the contexts where we can take dominion together alongside other embodied image-bearers. Of course, here as so often, we face the threat of a feedback loop, since the very digital narcotics that we go to numb our pain serve to further cut us off from the only relationships that can cure us. Perhaps only the body of Christ can save us from our digital death spiral, offering a community of authentic affirmation that can be an antidote to both futility and flattery.