If the Western media presents these individuals as digital freakshows, in Japan the fictosexuality phenomenon is widely known: it has been a named trend since at least the Eighties. There, fictosexuals aren’t anomalies, but rather outgrowths of the otaku subculture, which attracts people whose interest in pop culture is so intense that they retreat from public life, becoming “hikikomori” or “shut-ins”.

Though sometimes described as “suffering” with a 2D complex, as they call it, Japanese fictosexuals see their proclivity as an orientation; in fact, some are fighting for legal recognition. In the fascinating Fictosexual Manifesto, the authors claim that they are “beyond the heterosexual matrix”, boldly stating that they must “denaturalise interpersonally oriented sexuality” — a conception of sexuality that privileges human-to-human attraction.

Academia has also been known to take orientations such as fictosexuality and objectum sexuality seriously — much more so than the media. However, the literature is sparse and concentrated outside of the Western world. In the West, meanwhile, a handful of existing studies have suggested that fictosexuals — and objectum sexuals — exhibit a few important qualities. One, they’re not crazy: they’re not like the delusional erotomaniacs who believe their objects return their affections. Rather, the “fictophilic paradox” is that you know your love is one-sided, but your emotions persist regardless. Two: preliminary data shows they’re more likely to have autistic qualities, suggesting a link between fictosexulity and difficulties with interpersonal relationships. And three, despite the traditional belief that romantic love revolves around personhood, even more important is the feeling that the object of one’s affection has a personality. In other words, there’s reason to believe that for fictosexuals, one-sided love is real love.

Some outspoken fictosexuals, such as the authors of The Fictosexual Manifesto and people on the r/fictosexual subreddit, have argued that their delegitimisation and stigmatisation, such as the claims that their partnerships “aren’t real”, is a form of bigotry. But it’s not hard to see why some people prefer to laugh at fictosexuality. It destabilises our most basic assumptions about love. Or at least what we think our most basic assumptions about love are. But what if those assumptions are worth revising?

Suggested reading

The sex coach is killing intimacy

By Kat Rosenfield

The truth is that there is already some acceptance that you can feel attracted to someone who largely exists inside your own head. Centuries ago, it was common for mystics to describe ecstatic love after visions of divine entities. And Dante’s love for Beatrice, whom he claimed to adore despite having met her only twice, is usually presented as romantic.

In fact, I suspect that fictosexuality is an extreme version of something we all experience occasionally, even if we are not used to naming it. Most people have experienced celebrity crushes; they are usually seen as a normal part of fandom. So many people love Taylor Swift or Harry Styles or a member of BTS, knowing they will never receive any affection in return — a dynamic very like the fictophilic paradox. And sometimes this love is extreme or even genuinely delusional, for instance, in the woman who recently went viral on TikTok for her belief that she is “in a relationship” with Enrique Iglesias. It is also not seen as pathological to feel attracted to, for instance, Mr Darcy. In Cassandra Clare’s 2003 essay, “Fictional Character Crushes”, she writes that such attraction is “one-sided, but strangely satisfying for all that”.

In some ways, all crushes begin as one-sided crushes on fictional characters. When we first meet a person, we imagine them to be a certain way, but they will invariably turn out to be someone quite different. Perhaps Janet Malcolm put it best in 1980: “The most precious and inviolate of entities — personal relations — is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.”

This dynamic becomes more dangerous in a world where we’re increasingly mediated by the internet, which allows us to postpone the clash of fantasy and reality. We author our identities online in a way that we aren’t able to in the physical world. Are there elements of fictosexuality in developing a crush on an anonymous tweeter? Is there a significant difference between feeling attracted to someone you’re chatting to on Tinder, but haven’t yet met, and being compelled to converse with a chatbot that speaks in the voice of your favourite fictional character? In both cases, you are imagining that the person is real.

The context of all this is that people increasingly see themselves and the people around them in terms of the media they consume. The phenomenon of “self-narrativising” has been much-discussed in recent years — in persistent conversations about “main character syndrome”, for instance. People have started to view their lives in terms of the “seasons” of television shows, with less important experiences being spoken of as “subplots”. If you walk around with a Spotify soundtrack influencing your emotions, and you’re already tacitly viewing your life through a narrative lens, how does that impact how you feel about other people? To what extent is listening to a Olivia Rodrigo song while you think about a recent event shaping how you feel about it?

We are also immersed in a crisis of intimacy, which has coincided with increased awareness of sexualities that involve a lot less sex, including aegosexuality — which, like fictosexuality, exists on a spectrum with asexuality. Aegosexuals are defined as people who “become aroused by sexual content (at times) without wanting to engage in sexual activities personally”. To me, that sounds like a recasting of two fairly common sexual scenarios. Could we call the “reply guy” who is sexually aroused by direct messaging people on social media with no intention to meet them an aegosexual? What about the incel who prefers pornography to the difficult pursuit of a human relationship? Whether or not we put labels on it, there is a rise in behaviour that involves a retreat from having relationships in the real world.

Suggested reading

Why is my chatbot hitting on me?

By Kathleen Stock

There’s a story in Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen that encapsulates the online dangers of this. A young man, Peter, falls in love with a woman in a multi-user dungeon — a text-based virtual world with no images. He describes his relationship as “intellectual, emotionally supportive, and erotic”. Their sex life, though mediated by a screen and confined to text, is “rich and fulfilling”. Eventually, he flies from North Carolina to Oregon to meet his Beatrice, and lo and behold, there’s no chemistry.

“Real life gave me too much information,” he later shares with Turkle. When he goes to review the chatlogs between him and his lover — a months-long affair — he struggles to find his relationship in them. “Where was the warmth?” Turkle asks. “The sense of complicity and empathy?” Peter doesn’t know, and consequently realises that he must have invented it. The relationship was closer to literature than real intimacy. Peter projected what he wanted onto “the text” of their companionship; he filled in the blank spaces left by the screen.

Yet what happened to Peter isn’t so strange when you think about it. How different is it from being excited to meet someone you’ve been chatting to on a dating app, only to find that you don’t get on? This blending of fiction and reality is something almost all of us, to varying degrees, engage in. We project details that aren’t there onto texts all the time. The novel we’re engrossed in describes the love interest as a charming Englishman; we see Timothée Chalamet in our mind’s eye and fall further into the story’s world. Somebody sends us a text message, and because they included a particular emoji — that smiley face — it reads as creepy instead of sweet.

Online, without body language, there is so much space for ambiguity, even if there is more time to craft a witty response. We may feel more in control of ourselves, but we are also more likely to be mistaken in another. And the more time we spend in the imaginary world, the harder it becomes to interpret the real one — and the more fictosexual we become, even if the objects of our affection are living, breathing people.

The messages had a brief heyday in 2016, making the rounds of New York City editors and literary agents, in advance of a public reading I gave in the East Village. In the cultural moment just before Donald Trump’s emergence, these half-baked far-Right musings were a novelty; alas, Trump’s presidential triumph scuppered plans to make an eBook out of them. But I still re-read them, when I want to remember the old man. (He had, of course, hoped that I would: “I send these because life and death is about MIND over MATTER…….&& I want to reMIND u that it don’t matter…..”) Perhaps it was loneliness that made me wonder if his voice could ever be resurrected.

In my day job, as a senior content manager for a research consultancy, I often use GPT-4. It is competent at various brute-force operations — turning lengthy transcripts into notes, proofreading content — even if the inputs require constant fine-tuning and the outputs require careful attention to ensure accuracy. But could it write content that would bring back the dead? Could GPT-4, if sufficiently trained, analyse my father’s emails — and perhaps even write new ones?

“Well well well, my BOY, let ol’ FOG lay down some KNOWLEDGE on the import-ants of self-defense!” So began one of the emails produced by GPT-4, after I fed my father’s archive into it. As an opening it feels slightly more stilted than the source material, and I can’t recall my father ever referring to me as a “BOY”, but he did call himself the “FOG” (short for “effing old guy”) and randomly capitalise entire words and hyphenate others (“import-ants”), though he would never have bothered with the apostrophe after “ol’” (he’d merely write “ol”).

I know my father’s voice when I see it — it is a script that runs in my own head, like a built-in AI. And as GPT-4 generated more missives, I was increasingly certain: it could not replicate my father’s erratic punctuation usage. The mere ellipse was never enough for him; he would sometimes type out a dozen full-stops or more. These time signatures often appeared in the long, quiet sections in the saddest emails he wrote: “Go out there and just outwit the bastards………Nothing else to Life…..every body loses but some people stay in the game for a long time and have a happy life and family….I never did…..oh well…I saw it and I read the writing on the wall……” It was these inconsistencies that enabled me to hear his voice, these peculiarities that made his work human.

I doubt that a machine will ever be able to mimic his syntax. But given the right prior inputs, GPT-4 could respond to questions or develop political platforms (or children’s stories) in a manner that eerily resembled my father’s thought process. Was this a true reanimation, or merely what University of Washington linguist Emily Bender, a critic of equating AI outputs with human reasoning, might describe as “stochastic parroting”? The AI certainly captured subtleties in my father’s work that I and others overlooked during that reading in the East Village. Listeners then likely saw him as some outsider-artist variant of Alex Jones, spewing rote conspiracy theory. But ChatGPT, when asked to summarise his politics, cut through the outlandish expression to a more comprehensible core: “Your father’s concern for the environment and the need for sustainable practices aligns with the environmentalist movement [while] his preference for local communities and self-sufficiency has some connections to localism.”

This was, of course, true, though I never thought about it in this way — nor did I consider that his “focus on gender equality and women’s empowerment aligns with progressive politics”. My father was the sort of man who moved to a “mountain house” in Montana to live out his final days; he was far closer to the libertarian Right of Karl Hess — who also retired to the wilderness — than the more culturally conservative, evangelical Right that dominated his era (or the MAGA movement that dominated mine). The AI analysed and reproduced a version of my father distinct from who I remembered. But perhaps there were things I had missed.

The progress AI has made in understanding and generating human-like text over the past six months is impressive — a great feat of engineering that will, in time, be remembered alongside the construction of the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. However, AI models are still unable to mimic the voices of highly idiosyncratic, distinctive writers. The polymath University of Paris professor Justin E.H. Smith, for instance, has found AI largely incapable of simulating his unique voice. But in his case the content, rather than simply the form, of his communication is highly complex.

Suggested reading

AI is a false prophet

By Jacob Howland

The writing of Right-leaning political blogger Curtis Yarvin, on the other hand, appears stylish on the surface, but is often considered lacking in substance — a fellow editor noted that removing every other sentence from Yarvin’s excessively ornamental prose would not change its meaning in the slightest. Yarvin believes that GPT-4 cannot reason or think, merely discern and reproduce patterns. His writing, however, is undeniably replicable; a sentence such as “the only way to write about finance is to be either neither bull nor bear, or both” seems sophisticated at first glance, but it exemplifies what one of my old writing mentors might call “all sizzle and no steak”. In other words, Yarvin, like many commentators succeeding on the internet, can skilfully assemble sentences that can be skimmed for hours but forgotten in minutes — meaning that imitating his work is the ideal scenario for an LLM that ceaselessly creates a persuasive imitation of style, without any regard for substance.

The general public, most of whom skim content rather than paying attention to form, may struggle to differentiate between authentic and AI-generated content. More perceptive readers can sometimes detect minor discrepancies that reveal the artificial nature of the imitation — but even they aren’t perfect. In one study, researchers investigated if LLMs could be as good as humans at creating philosophical texts, by fine-tuning GPT-3 with philosopher Daniel C. Dennett’s works. While experts and philosophy blog readers performed above chance level in distinguishing Dennett’s answers from the model’s, they still fell short of the expected success rate.

The implications here are alarming. If most people are unable to distinguish between human-generated and AI-generated content, creativity and critical thinking will become rarer attributes. A new class divide could spring up, between the privileged few capable of discerning the nuances of AI-generated content, and a growing mass of individuals left to consume, without question, whatever is presented to them. The “priestly class” would consolidate power by reading between the hieratic lines of AI-generated content — just as the literate elites in ancient Egyptian and Sumerian civilisations did, by controlling access to sacred texts and legal knowledge. Their ability to recognise genuine information would give them a competitive edge in everything from financial markets to politics, further widening the gap between the informed and the uninformed. Meanwhile, the vast majority — an ever-expanding pool of digital-age helots left to hew wood and draw water — would become increasingly vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation. The forces that shape our lives would be less accountable, and it would be ever harder to address ethical concerns or make well-informed decisions.

Suggested reading

Why is my chatbot hitting on me?

By Kathleen Stock

Unfortunately, it is difficult to even imagine the mass education needed to achieve the necessary levels of discernment — much less its effectuation. Most people would rather be watching 15-second TikTok videos than close reading. And while a significant percentage of the world’s population will always, unfortunately, lack the cognitive skills or cultural capital to navigate our swiftly-changing content ecosystem, even the well-educated are in danger. We are witnessing a decline in the humanities, which traditionally turn future workers into critical thinkers, capable of discerning the idiosyncrasies in human expression.

As AI-generated content becomes increasingly sophisticated, we must prize those idiosyncrasies. They are, as I saw when I attempted to replicate my father’s emails, what make each writer’s voice distinct and authentic; they are the reason discerning readers might pay to read a mind-expanding Substack instead of boring, one-note op-eds or paint-by-numbers YA fiction. By embracing the unique aspects of the way they communicate, writers may create work that resonates on a deeper level, appealing to an audience that still wants to read the best work that humans can produce.

My father’s voice is one of a kind. But to find out if my conclusions are replicable by a machine, I decided to ask ChatGPT to provide its own opinion on the likelihood of it fully “replacing” a given writer. “It’s important to consider that my responses are based on patterns and structures found in the data I’ve been trained on, rather than personal experiences or emotions,” it replied. “As a result, even though I can generate text that appears to be in the style of a specific person, it is still an approximation and not a direct reflection of their thoughts or ideas.” Of course, when I am communicating with a machine that reproduces the thoughts of my dead father with a reasonably high degree of precision, it’s pretty to think it might be otherwise. But more alarming is the question I am left with: Could I have put it better myself?