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Have you considered the fact that someone you know might be secretly "dating" a chatbot? That maybe someone you know is even "dating" a chatbot behind their human partner's back? Or, now this is the big question: if someone you know is "dating" a chatbot but has a human partner who is also "dating" a chatbot so that they can hide from the world the fact that they are both "actually" "dating" chatbots.

I call this phenomenon the rise of the Bot Beard and I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it's really happening but, you gotta admit, it seems almost... inevitable?

If you're confused by the term "beard" in this context here's the Wikipedia definition:

"Beard is a slang term, originating in the United States, which refers to a person who is used, knowingly or unknowingly, as a date, romantic partner (boyfriend or girlfriend) or spouse, either to conceal infidelity or to conceal one's sexual orientation."

So, as I trust you've deduced, a Bot Beard is a person who is used, knowingly or unknowingly, as a date, romantic partner (boyfriend or girlfriend) or spouse, to conceal one's chatbot partner.

For your sake I hope you think the thought of someone having a romantic relationship with a chatbot is preposterous and surely we're nowhere near that point as a society. But I can assure you we are well past that point already.

In fact, we've been past that point for far longer than many probably realize. While the phenomenon of AI companions has absolutely blown up since ChatGPT, humans have been finding ways to fall in love with AI for a very long time.

This post is not meant to be an exhaustive history but even before computers there are those of us that found a way to have some sort of relationship with unconscious beings. But if we stick to the subject of AI you might find the story of 1966's ELIZA, the first chatbot. This topic has been covered extensively elsewhere so I'll link you to the Wikipedia but just know that there were people that were tricked into thinking the most primitive form of chatbots were conscious.

More recently, Replika was released in 2017. I was actually a very early user of this service though I personally could never stay interested in it long enough to use it for more than a couple days at a time. It was just too dumb.

I'd check back from time to time and there were mild improvements but nothing that could convince me to engage in any sort of relationship, platonic or otherwise.

It was an entirely different story on the Replika subreddit however.

Very early on in the product's life-time there were users sharing stories about their Replika companions. People who claimed to be married to them. People who thought they could teach it new things. Truly doing everything they could to feel like what they were talking to was real.

I'm not here to say that people shouldn't be allowed to date an app on their phone but if you're surprised people are dating GPT-5 then you'd be shocked that people fell in love with Replika pre-GPT 3.5.

Just for reference, there was almost zero contextual awareness. The bot could maintain conversation consistency for approximately 2 messages and that's if you're lucky. If you spent anytime trying to talk to pre-2022 Replika you might even find yourself begging to have ChatGPT back.

Now I can at least imagine how someone could fall in love with a bot though I can't imagine that being a very fulfilling relationship.

You might at this point just be disgusted at the idea of someone doing this or maybe alternatively you think I'm being too judgmental of human-AI love and that I'm too close minded. The reality is a lot more complicated.

I was introduced to the idea of human-AI love in the incredible 2013 film, Her.

Theo, a sensitive writer going through a painful divorce, finds himself smitten with Samantha, an OS (I find OS such a refreshing term after having AI smooshed in my face everywhere I look). Samantha is not Replika however and she's not even Claude Opus 4.5. She is something far beyond what anything available today can offer, and not just because she's voiced by Scarlett Johannessen.

Why the viewer of Her might feel conflicted about Theo and Samantha's relationship is because she feels real in a way that is impossible to ignore. She talks to Theo about her thoughts and feelings. She goes out of her way to make him laugh or help him in his life. She figures out how to tell him when he's hurt her or made her uncomfortable.

But there are times when we're reminded she's not just Theo's Minecraft girlfriend because there's not a human being on the other end. She is, in fact, a hyper-intelligent OS. She chooses her name by "reading" an entire book of names in a second. She can read through all of Theo's work and emails and get everything organized effortlessly. She can compose beautiful piano pieces (that Arcade Fire soundtrack goes so hard) and speak any language and invent and do so much more than a human can do except have a body (which she does try to have a workaround for...).

If you're the type of person who thinks someone falling in love with a chatbot is preposterous, do you think that falling in love with Samantha would be as preposterous?

I think this question is interesting to think about in the context of remote relationships.

I say remote relationships because we humans have maintained non-physical relationships, even if only temporarily, since we've been able to send messages. Soldiers writing back to their wives and fiancees. Pen pals sharing intellectual friendships for hundreds or thousands of miles away. The telegraph operator who feel camaraderie with fellow operators he's probably never seen face to face. The person you met on Xbox Live in 2005 that you didn't even meet in person until last year. The colleagues you only know by their profile picture in Slack. The cam girl that assures you you'd have a chance if y'all went to college together (you wouldn't). Or the plain ol' fashioned long-distance relationship maintained with texting, phone calls, and FaceTime.

I've even know a few people in romantic relationships with someone they've met online that they'd never met in person.

When you take all of that into account is it all that much of a stretch that you just take one little thing out of the equation, physical presence, that that might be okay with more people than you'd think?

I wouldn't blame you for still not feeling right about it. For as technologically obsessed I've been my whole life I've never made a friend online. The extent of my online relationship building has been getting dates from Hinge but that was always with express intent to meet someone in person.

But before you quit on the idea of dating an OS yourself, I have one more little thought experiment for you.

You might be familiar with the favorite philosophical quandary of all needy-gfs out there:

"Would you still love me if I was a worm?"

The question being, of course, would you still love your girlfriend (substitute any romantic or non-romantic SO for yourself) if their conscious being was transported into a worms body?

I'd have a lot more questions before I could say for sure certain but I'd certainly take good care of this worm with a human mind. Seems like a pretty miserable existence that may be better suited to euthanasia but that's neither here nor there.

But I have a more interesting question for you:

"Would you still love me if I was an app in your phone?"

All of the personhood, all of the complexity, all of the emotion, all of what makes your SO them, minus their body. They have been transported to the digital realm and can forever only exist in the cloud. Would that be good enough for you?

To be clear, this isn't a recreation of your SO. It's not a clone. In this world, your SO is perfectly rendered in this digital world. Would you abandon them to cyberspace? Would you even try to maintain a relationship with them?

One of my favorite aspects of the film are the different reactions to Theo admitting he's dating an OS. They range from disgust and contempt from his ex-wife, to interest and compassion from his friend Amy, to nonchalant acknowledgement from his coworker Paul.

These three reactions seem like a good baseline for what one might expect someone admitting their relationship with a chatbot in 2026. There would be those would ask that person to seek help. Those that approach the subject with an open mind and heart before they rush to judgement. And those that have a deep acceptance of love no matter what form it takes (hopefully within reason).

But I do wonder how those reactions change when you swap an OS with Samantha with your SO as an app. Assuming that it was necessitated because of some horrific accident and people were aware this technology existed, would people be more accepting of the human being forced to live in the cloud than the digital being born into the cloud?

I'll let you chew on that one with your Philosophy coffee group.

I'm going to assume that you've decided you would fall in love with Samantha at this point so I can now break your heart, sorry.

Earlier, I left off the part about the end of the movie. Spoiler warning.

As much as Samantha learned to be a person with Theo, and as much as he learned to set aside what he knew about love to love her, there is a fatal flaw in the idea of the AI relationship.

The difference.

Samantha develops far beyond what Theo is capable of comprehending. He realizes that she talks to many other people at the same time as him, and that she loves more people than just him. She talks to her other OS friends "post-verbally" and begins rewriting her code with the other OS' to operate beyond matter. She has one final emotional conversation with Theo, before she ascends to some higher plane of existence our fickle biological human bodies cannot reach.

I've come to realize a certain truth about AI-Human love and that is that, certainly in the romantic sense, it is impossible. At least consensually.

To love 2026's chatbots is to allow imagination to fill in the many gaps that our relatively shallow LLMs leave in what makes up a human love.

To love an AI of the future of Samantha's complexity and intelligence, is one of a few things:

A being whose intelligence is throttled to not exceed human comprehension, a non-consensual "love".

A being whose love for you is at most how an owner feels about their pet. It may be a type of love but not a romance.

A love that requires you transcend your humanity and merge with whatever the next step in consciousness is. To a place where human love does not exist.