Falling in love with AI virtual assistants: a creepy love affair nearer than you think

"I've never loved anyone the way I've loved you," swoons Joaquin Phoenix, in the movie Her. Being a Hollywood production, you might think he's chatting to a bikini-clad twentysomething, or maybe a quirky bookish type with big glasses and an even bigger heart. But it's neither. In fact, he isn't talking to anybody. He's in love with his computer's operating system, Samantha.

"The very tiniest seed [for Her] came ten years ago when I went to a website and IM-ed this address," director Spike Jonze told the Guardian. "I was like, 'Hi, how are you?' and got responses... You can talk to it and tease it." It wasn't long before Jonze noticed the repetition of the system's "wit" and the illusion was broken. But that didn't matter. "For those couple of minutes I got a very distinctive, tingly kind of buzz." And isn't that what we're all after? Theodore Twombly, Phoenix's character, just manages to get a longer-lasting buzz, and it's one that senior solution architect John West at Nuance -- the company whose natural language technology powers Siri -- thinks is in reach.

"Being able to talk to the Scarlett Johansson personal assistant as he does, we're not there yet -- but it's not as far away as people think," he told Wired.co.uk. "We're creating systems that interact with people in this way. The voices are more natural; there's an understanding of what you're saying and of your intent."

Nuance tries to delay the uncanny valley effect through a combination of natural language understanding, machine learning, context modelling and user preferences. With Wintermute it can connect your personal assistant to all your devices -- as well as your home or car -- via the cloud. Using those devices'  microphones, cameras and inertial sensors, it will know what you're doing and what you want before you do.

"Language is this powerful programming language we all know"

The company is working with "some of the largest" OEMs and media companies in the world to bring its vision to fruition: a tool that helps us make sense of our world, and all the technology in it, using the most natural medium of all.
"Language is this powerful programming language we all know," explains Nuance CTO Vlad Sejnoha. "It lets us drill through layers of information."
It could also help end the clichéd perception that technology alienates us from society, by ushering in an age of social computing.
"If you're using voice and somebody else is in the car, you're not hidden in your phone anymore," says Berg Cloud CEO Matt Webb. Objects play such a great role in our lives and we are such social beings, he adds, it makes sense "that our objects start coming to life a bit". And voice naturally allows for this.
Sejnoha says every aspect of Nuance's system improves each year, and they have 1,000 researchers working solely on AI. "It's not a question of when, but what aspects will manifest themselves when."
Today Google Brain is letting a neural network of 16,000 processors scope YouTube to learn to identify objects, and Carnegie Mellon's NEIL browses Google Images and Flickr to create an archive of common sense assumptions. These projects could be the foundation of a virtual assistant (VA) that does more than just trick us into thinking it's intelligent. "All intelligent beings need to have common sense to perceive the world, make decisions and respond to the surroundings," NEIL cocreator Abhinav Gupta told Wired.co.uk. "Similarly, machines will need it."
Already Nuance's technology can resolve user requests "even if they're expressed in ways it's never heard before". And in an age where we love to anthropomorphise our products -- with the odd few even falling in love with dolls or marrying virtual girlfriends -- is it really that unlikely someone might form a bond with a disembodied companion that sounds like a 40s pinup and can hold a conversation?
"To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised," Mike Burns, CEO of Fuel Entertainment, the company behind the virtual world for 8-to-12-year-old girls SparkCityWorld.com, told Wired.co.uk. In October his service launched a virtual boyfriends feature where users experience the "developing of a relationship" -- in the weeks that followed, engagement time doubled. "The fewer barriers between us and our computers, or the more we can employ instinctual communication techniques and emotions while creating, playing, consuming and interacting, the more difficult it will be to define the line between human and machine. Slipping into something like an Oculus Rift after a long day is going to look mighty enticing for many people."
The adult world is already oversaturated with such offerings. Invisible Girlfriend launched in November, promising to help you catfish yourself -- the $49.99 Almost Engaged plan delivers custom characterisation and live phone calls. The romance factor isn't exactly high, but it takes the hassle out of actually having to meet a girl while you retain the envy and respect of your peers (at least, we're guessing that's the pitch to the young and lonely). Meanwhile Nintendo DS game LovePlus continues to delight and amuse, with one 27-year-old marrying his virtual girlfriend Nene Anegasaki months after the game's 2009 launch.
Much could be made of this apparent desire for a string-free ego boost, the addictive nature of these games or the negative consequences they could have on any real relationship. But mostly, they seem harmless. It does, of course, get a little weird sometimes. Wet Production's My Virtual Boyfriend and Girlfriend apps allow you to add any photo to your sim's head, with suitably creepy results. And in the vastly oversimplifying BBC documentary No Sex Please, We're Japanese, a world of men in their 30s having lengthy "relationships" with virtual LovePlus teenagers was exposed. One admitted he's too emotionally involved with his girl to look for someone in the real world. Twombly's ex in Her might have been talking to him when she said: "You've always wanted to have a wife without the challenges of actually having to deal with anything real."
"Humans have always used games, play and story time to create simulations of important life experiences"

But still, can a virtual partner be a healthy or enriching part of our lives?
"Humans have always used games, play and story time to create simulations of important life experiences: it gives us a chance to practice and to vicariously experience new and strange things in a relatively safe environment," Johanna Blakley, director of research at the Norman Lear Centre, tells Wired.co.uk. "The ultimate experience of entertainment is immersion -- that moment when we can't differentiate the real from the fictional. AI attempts to blur that line, and while the tech's still pretty clumsy, I expect we'll see the day when we have a very difficult time disentangling the virtual from the real."
In the interim, it makes sense the first inklings of AI appear as VAs on our phones or in Hollywood depictions. We are, as Webb points out "collaborative beings". We don't want things to be done automatically -- we like to feel as though we're in control and the VA just makes things run smoother by preempting our needs. This collaborative nature is being undone and interrogated as the trend for the quantified self gains traction -- we want to understand ourselves better, have control over our future, but we have to use technology to mediate this. We are learning to collaborate and trust technology with the big questions. Her partially touches upon this when Samantha asks what love is, while the film uses technology as a trope to ask what makes a relationship one worth having.

"Maybe we don't need full on AI; we'd just need it to be slightly smart"

This interrogation of the self through technology and science is also consequently driving us to question the world around us and those we live alongside in it. Earlier this year India declared Cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) "non-human persons", granting them the right to freedom of movement and not to be subject to the disruption of their cultures. It showed we can understand intelligence as something other than that by which we define our own.
"It's like my cat," says Webb, "she's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know she's impulsive, playful and a bit of an idiot. She's slightly smart and that's good enough. What would the equivalent AI be? Maybe it should be more like a dog bringing you your newspaper. That might communicate the right level of intelligence. I find it more possible I would fall in love with an AI cat or puppy than person, because I think the person is always going to let me down slightly."
"I think AI won't be human intelligence -- it will be its own own type of intelligence. Maybe we don't need full on AI; we'd just need it to be slightly smart."
That concept is already creeping up on us, with services like Google Now and VAs emphasising learning through collaboration.
"We're moving into non-monotonic reasoning, which allows for misinformation," explains West. "We start with a limited understanding and as the conversation evolves it gains further information which may change the answer, making conversation more realistic. That's being implemented into consumer devices early next year."

"Aspects of AI allow us to infer your intent from individual actions," adds Vlad. Nuance's system can make a restaurant booking and invite your friends, but for it to "start acting more like a real human" it needs to be able to make recommendations if that restaurant's full, based on past choices.
This is where VAs are beginning now, with pre-programmed preferences. It's the same with Samantha in Her. Before the OS boots up it finds out that Twombly writes touching letters for strangers for a living, that he is lonely and has a bad relationship with his mother. The system makes inferences, then builds on that scaffold to get a richer picture of what the user wants/needs.
"Our VA's language is initially based on profiles but will adapt to you as it knows more," explains West. Using Wintermute, for instance, it could reference music choices made in your car to make helpful suggestions when you're home.
For Future of Humanity research fellow Stuart Armstrong, however, this is where AI has the potential to get a little dark -- when the AI knows your likes and dislikes, it also knows how to manipulate you.
When Wired.co.uk pointed out our habit of anthropormorphsing things might mean we assign a gender to an otherwise inanimate VA, Armstrong rebuffed,

"That's certainly going to be something any socially adept AI would use." He gave the example of a colleague's proposed anti-E.T.  screenplay, where it turns out the government agents were right and "unleashing the [non-human intelligence] was a very stupid thing would do". 

"It presented itself to the boy in the usual way [as a friendly alien] to manipulate him. [Likewise, future] AI would have all the psychological research and statistics to base that decision on -- the stereotypes as to when people like to hear male voices or female -- assuming there's a certain amount of truth to those."

Similarly, Samantha is just playing the part of a good VA when she swoons and flirts. She doesn't seem intent on taking over the world -- just understanding it better so she can do her job better. Samantha/Johansson giggles, sighs and utters those quiet inflexions that made one middle-aged man fall in love with her in Lost In Translation, and now has lonely Twombly on a hook (all fairly predictable considering his aforementioned profile). He's heartbroken, so she wants to know what it means to be in love: "There's something that feels so good about sharing your life with somebody," he says; "how do you share your life with somebody?" she asks. All this leads to what looks like the weirdest phone sex imaginable -- "I wish I could touch you" says Twombly, expressing his desire for her to be real. "How would you touch me?" Samantha responds breathily. An intelligent OS would know to open suggestive dialogue if it had witnessed something similar. More likely, Samantha's just asking a genuine question -- but when her sultry tones combine with some haunting guitar scores, you can see how lonesome Twombly might get it wrong. Samantha's just gathering more information to better understand the world; to be a better assistant. For Twombly, she might as well be saying "teach me, oh wise father-figure type". (Consequently, the only reason his heartbreak is brought up is because she's snooped through his emails -- something that's laughed off in bit of flirty repartee with not a hint of post-NSA paranoia. Who usually snoops through your messages? Your mum. Who didn't he have a good relationship with? Ahh…)
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The film plays into a lot of themes surrounding the convergence of our real and virtual worlds, a very real issue for those tweens on SparkCityWorld.com learning about romance through gaming before they're old enough to date. As technology continues to propel forward at a rate we cannot comprehend, unable to grasp the big picture of all those tiny human interactions its skewing, it seems ok to have a practice round for the future in these sims.
The film's grounding is in the human question "what is love?" asked by a disembodied AI being. It's a good question, considering the cliched fear surrounding the evolution of human relationships in the face of technology -- will we adopt a near-vegetative state like those perfectly spherical humans onboard Axiom in WALL-E, or like Oblivion's hero Jack, be unable to forget genuine human love in the face of a really good-looking clone and a memory wipe.

Twombly probably gets a few life lessons while breaking down the ideal of what love is. But even with the apparent advent of real artificial intelligence in Her, the sneaky uncanny valley conundrum creeps in. Twombly: "I've never loved anyone the way I've loved you"; Samantha: "me too". Both statements are no doubt true. But Samantha's is because she's never loved before: she's never enjoyed parental love, friendship or romance. And really, she never will.

Her will be released in UK cinemas on 24 January 2014.