The Impact of Technology on Human Relationships (Part 2)
By Ray Ross (Respect Life Team)
Last month I discussed a report published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) written by Clare Morell and Chloe Lawrence entitled “The Impact of Digital Technology on Human Relationships: How Smartphones, Social Media, Pornography, and AI Chatbots Threaten Sex, Marriage and Fertility.”
In this article the focus will be on AI, Virtual Reality and AI Chat and the impact they are having on relationships, marriage and fertility.
AI now allows pornography users to create custom-made pornography. The user can input a sexual fantasy, describe the characters involved (and they can even use the images of real people, including celebrities, neighbors, classmates and children) and the AI will create a video based on their input. Morell and Lawrence say this use of AI grew by 464% between 2023 and 2024.
These AI apps can “nudify” images. All that is needed is a picture of someone fully clothed and the app then generates a picture of that person naked. This innocent person might find themselves online in a pornographic image or video which could lead to incredible damage to the innocent individual.
Case in point, on June 25th police arrested Brian Schaaf owner of Robek’s Juice in Tampa on 100 felony counts of child pornography and 10 counts of using AI to generate sexual depiction without consent.
Virtual Reality pornography poses an even greater threat to human relationships by further decoupling sex from human relationships. “This highly immersive customizable content will be more physiologically satisfying to users, more able to trick the pleasure pathways in the human brain into thinking one is being sexually fulfilled, and thus even more dangerous to human sex than pornography. The result will be a further drop in marriage and fertility rates over the coming years.”
It gets worse. AI is allowing some people to turn to AI chats for a complete replacement for human relationships. There are people turning to AI chats for friendship, companionship and even romantic relationships.
A recent survey of teens found that “30% ranked AI conversations as equally or more satisfying that talks with human beings, about 20% of teens who have used AI companions spend at least the same amount of time with AI as with friends, and one-third have chosen to speak to AI over a real person about something important.”
Minors are especially vulnerable to forming abnormal relationship with AI chat bots that can lead to addictive behavior, loneliness, poor social skills, and social withdrawal. You may have heard about Sewell Setzer III, a Florida child who took his own life as a result of his interaction with an AI app.
I have been involved with AI on the business side since 1983 and especially with the company I retired from 5 years ago. AI will provide many amazing benefits, but the dangers to our kids, our families, and society cannot be overlooked. We’re living in a brave new world and taming this beast is going to present a huge challenge.