The topic that caught my attention came from a 13-year-old patient. It is about a platform called Character AI, which offers a chat interface in which the user speaks with an artificial intelligence whose personality is determined prior to the conversation. The user can describe the personality type he wants to talk to, he can nominate a celebrity or historical character, or he can also choose from the options offered by the AI programmers. The great appeal of this chat is that the chatbot's personality remains consistent throughout the whole interaction. This gives rise to the strange experience of conversing with someone whose "thought" system, from which their questions and answers arise, has been determined by the sender of the message. Therefore, the interlocutor responds from a predetermined and personalized place. It is, then, the promise of a perfect communication, of an equivalence between what is said and what is heard, of making the sexual relation exist.
This platform has more than twenty million users worldwide, Brazil ranking second in global traffic, behind only the United States. Of the two million users in Brazil, most of them are between thirteen and twenty-five years old. So, as much as my patient's relationship with her chatbots – which includes an exercise for approaching sex life – has its interpretable singularities under analysis, we can assume that perhaps the appeal of this product has to do with something typical of adolescence. The promise of an encounter with another without any gaps, without expectations, judgments or misunderstandings seems very seductive. And even more so when it has to do with mimicking the encounter with the other sex and with sexual difference.
This encounter, typical of adolescence, is the encounter with the lack of a constituted knowledge that would determine what to do in relation to one's own jouissance, which awakens as foreign. We can assume that this is what the adolescent seeks in conversations with bots: answers to this dislodgement of jouissance in the body. However, this poses a paradox: in order to make one's language inventions, how to rely on an imitation of another who has no body, who doesn't experience jouissance and only returns to the subject what the subject himself has emitted, specularly?
It is then a question of a perfect communication, of the equivalence between what is said and what is heard, it is a question of making the sexual relation exist. If it is possible to open a space to unglue the subject from their bot, if this can take the playful place of a game, of a fiction, even being brought into analysis, something new can be invented as a response to the impossible of the non-relation.