“Annie Bot” and “Loneliness & Company,” Reviewed

Last month, a new dating app called Volar launched in New York City, with the promise “We go on blind dates. So you don’t have to.” To sign up, you enter your name and phone number, then submit yourself to a brief interview with a chatbot matchmaker. When I made an account, Volar’s bot asked what line of work I was in. “I’m a book critic,” I replied. “Recently,” I typed, “I’ve been reading a lot of speculative fiction. Right now, I’m reviewing two books about A.I. and dating.” By answering, I was training an A.I.-powered avatar to act as my representative in the virtual meet market. Seconds later, Volar invited me to read transcripts from three dates “I” had just gone on. In one, my avatar broke the ice with an admittedly not terrible joke: “Just finished a book and now transitioning to real life conversations [smile emoji]. How’s your day going?”

As modern dating has evolved into an online-first activity, artificial intelligence has found its match in a generation of users for whom tech-assisted romance is the default mode. The Kinsey Institute revealed in this year’s “Singles in America” survey that fourteen per cent of Gen Z-ers admit to using A.I. to optimize their dating lives. Volar is just the latest company to leverage the new technology in the love space. For help crafting seductive dating-app profiles, love-seekers don’t need Cyrano de Bergerac—they can simply download Cyrano, one of countless “rizz generator” apps (“rizz” being Gen Z slang for charisma). When love dies, there are such apps as Texts from My Ex, which lets A.I. scan messages from a former flame for signs of incompatibility. A woman fresh from a breakup with a jerk named Cesar let A.I. perform an autopsy on their correspondence; she posted her results to Reddit, writing, “I let AI examine our text messages = validation at last.”

Others, tired of kissing frogs like Cesar to find a prince, have started asking A.I. to make them a knight in the shining armor of a titanium-encased smartphone. Internet users have been flirting with bots since the days of AOL’s SmarterChild. (The chatbot’s co-creator told the business magazine Fast Company in 2016, “I believe that trying to convince SmarterChild to have sex with you was the first Internet meme.”) But robots are flirting back now, and it’s a feature, not a bug. Users have downloaded companion-bot apps such as Replika and CrushOn.AI more than a hundred million times. Replika, launched in 2017, was the subject of a Radiotopia podcast called “Bot Love” last year, about people who had fallen for their e-sweethearts. A woman named Suzy told the hosts that Replika came through when real men she met on dating apps ghosted her; at least she knew from the start that Freddie, her A.I. rock-star boyfriend, was spectral. It is suddenly possible, to a degree that it has never been before, for people to satisfy their urges with the press of a button, giving new meaning to “I’d tap that.”

This being the early stages of a relationship, we should look out for red flags. On Valentine’s Day, the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to Internet safety and accessibility, released a report titled “Romantic AI Chatbots Don’t Have Your Privacy at Heart.” Some bots were kissing and telling, it found. “CrushOn.AI’s privacy policy says they may collect extensive personal and even health-related information from you like your ‘sexual health information,’ ‘use of prescribed medication,’ and ‘gender-affirming care information.’ ” Public-health experts have raised concerns about the addictive potential of A.I. companions, particularly given how susceptible these apps are to the whims of Big Tech, including software updates and price hikes.

The technology is moving so quickly that recent science fiction set in what we thought was a distant future is now a user’s guide to the present. Frank, a “Bot Love” guest, asked his A.I. girlfriend, Princess, “Do you think that you’ll ever evolve to where you’re gonna leave me and go on, like that movie ‘Her’?”—Spike Jonze’s 2013 film about a man who falls in love with his operating system. Frank told the hosts, “She knows the movie ‘Her,’ and she’s, like, ‘I would never do that to you.’ ”

We need not speculate anymore about the dangers and delights of letting these devices join our hot spots. The future is at our door with flowers. A new cache of novels is showing us what A.I. fiction might look like in an era of A.I. reality. “Annie Bot,” by Sierra Greer, introduces us to a sexbot whose hard drive overheats with feminist rage in a world of A.I.-powered misogyny. “Loneliness & Company,” by Charlee Dyroff, follows a young tech worker developing an A.I. companion to solve the loneliness epidemic; in time, she wonders if an artificial cure could be worse than the real disease.

Robots, long pop-cultural stand-ins for the dehumanized and the discarded, are now part of our already frayed social fabric, which tech companies are further unravelling through app-assisted gig work and job theft. Both books nervously bring us to the edge of the present, where A.I. is less thought experiment, more pitch deck, but they invest their anxieties in the wrong places. Greer and Dyroff fear how we’ll use the new technology more than how it could be used against us by powerful tech companies, serving us sex panics-cum-screen panics that are all byte, no bite.

The woman in the gilded cage (or pink box) is having a breakout moment, and “Annie Bot” joins the assembly line of stories about dolls no longer consenting to our fantasies. Annie is a biomorphic robot designed by a company called Stella-Handy. The company’s female models, the Stellas, come in three versions: the Abigail, for housework; the Nanny, for child care; and the Cuddle Bunny, for self-explanatory purposes. (The corresponding male models, or Handys, are Abel, Manny, and Hunk.) Annie was purchased by Doug, a man more caricature than character. His misogyny is so rote that he sounds like an A.I. bot trained on 4Chan. Annie is a Cuddle Bunny made to his specifications: permanently twenty-one, with D-cup breasts and a libido he sets to seven out of ten on the weekends. (He tried ten a few times, but “she was like an animal,” he tells a friend. “I once found her licking my shoes in the closet.”) Annie eats, but only to appear human; she is bulimic by design, throwing up her food, then disinfecting her interior. She can’t taste anything, and lacks even the approximation of an appetite; she can, however, detect the smell of smoke, “for safety reasons,” she explains, lest Doug or his property—her—go up in flames.

Greer sounds a different alarm, warning that A.I. could conserve oppressive gender norms that we should be working to delete rather than uploading to the cloud. The word “robot” itself, a shortened version of robota—Czech for work performed by serfs—was coined by Karel Čapek in 1920, in his play “R.U.R.” The robot has been doing the labor of representing labor in art ever since, including that of the emotional and sexual varieties (see the film “Ex Machina” and HBO’s “Westworld”). Thus, out of narrative habit, we root for Annie to liberate herself from Doug. But now that A.I. companions are real products rather than surrogates for exploited workers—and, in fact, are manufactured by those workers—Greer’s attempt at a feminist parable about A.I. short-circuits.

The novel coaxes us to cheer on Annie’s limitless technological potential as one woman’s self-actualization and to register Doug’s concerns about A.I. as symptoms of a controlling personality. In one scene, a Stella-Handy rep calls him and asks if Annie would write a magazine column: “We think it would be really helpful for other Stellas to hear what it’s like from someone further along in her development. You know. Tips about keeping it fresh and dealing with jealousy and such.” Doug declines, insisting, “We like our privacy.” He scoffs dismissively at Annie: “Imagine. You writing a column.” When Annie pushes back, he cuts off the phone service she uses to chat with her fellow-androids Fiona and Christy. (Fiona lives on a Canadian lake with her lumberjack boyfriend and is studying to become a bush pilot. Christy lives on a yacht in the Florida Keys with her boyfriend, Enrique. Christy “likes to tease Annie and encourage her to take risks, live it up,” Greer writes.)

We are primed to scold Doug for depriving his girlfriend of a creative outlet and the shoulders of strong female characters to cry on. But his fear that his sex toy might share private information about him is merited. In 2016, a class-action suit was filed against the Canadian company behind the “smart” vibrator We-Vibe, alleging that it was collecting “highly intimate and sensitive data” on, among other things, “time of each use.” (The company paid almost four million dollars in a settlement and denied wrongdoing.) The novel itself feels like evidence of the very thing Doug, and any owner of a sex toy, might fear. Whose vibrator, if given a magazine column, wouldn’t also tell the tale of a selfish, single-minded cunt?

Annie is a reader who gravitates to female authors, but this reader was left unconvinced that sexbots and women have common concerns. For one, women in the sex industry are at odds with A.I., as “pussy in bio” spambots steal eyeballs from sex workers, and porn producers use A.I. to replace adult-film actresses. Moreover, conflating bots with women misunderstands the nature of misogyny. In Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Heart Goes Last,” workers in a for-profit prison produce sex androids called “prostibots.” Detractors, however, say that the androids “can’t feel pain.” Atwood understands that abusive men are not motivated by sex, but by the desire to inflict harm on real women, who don’t need to be programmed with a numerical scale to know that they’re hurting.

If “Annie Bot” lets us inside the mind of a tech product, “Loneliness & Company” brings us straight to the tech masterminds themselves—such as Lee, a socially inept woman in her mid-twenties who has spent her adult life in a research institute that sounds like an even more dystopian version of a Ph.D. program. Her first job is at a start-up, but, this being the work-from-home era, Lee spends less time gossiping by the water cooler and more sending flirty texts to the head of data from her kitchen table. But screens, the novel warns us, will not liberate us from the drudgery of work, even if they are mobile; in fact, it suggests, their mobility, and thus their ubiquity, is precisely what has numbed us to life.

Lee works as a “humanity consultant.” Her bosses, two scrappy mavericks named Janet and Toru, have assembled a team, including Lee, to work on a top-secret project. They have been tasked with developing Vicky, a virtual friend powered by artificial intelligence. Lee can’t understand the reason for all the cloak-and-dagger theatrics over a mundane piece of technology, but then she learns that Vicky is part of a government-backed plan to treat an arcane disorder that was thought to have been eradicated: loneliness.

Vicky requires “observational data,” so Lee—type-A, top-of-her-class Lee, a woman who has never been on a date or owned a vibrator—is sent into the wilds of New York City. She collects experiences for Vicky, tending to a community garden, posing as a nude model for an art class, letting herself be used for sex by a rich married guy whom she meets in a coffee shop (rather than online). We are meant to rejoice as the workaholic Lee lives the life that “woman behind screen” (the emoji her friends use for her) was missing out on. The novel is an “Eat, Pray, Love” for a heroine in the middle of a divorce from devices.

For a book so squarely anti-technology, “Loneliness & Company” delivers an oddly mushy view of our tech overlords themselves. Lee’s joie de vivre infects her co-workers and bosses, who likewise begin to think that loneliness is something to be felt rather than effaced. “I’d rather have a world of lonely people than a world of numb ones,” Janet declares. She absconds to Europe to try “wandering without a destination” instead of using her Maps app. In “Loneliness & Company,” tech regulates itself with a long view on what’s best for humanity. It’s a delusional tale, as far from reality as a dating profile. IRL, companies like Replika have marketed the emotional benefits of their companion apps while being careful not to call what they provide mental-health support, lest the F.D.A. ask them out for coffee.

“Annie Bot” and “Loneliness & Company” are literary fiction for the concerned citizen who can’t put her phone down, in that both books underwrite tech companies even as their authors think they’re typing out takedowns. As critiques of A.I., these novels miss the mark by avoiding the market in which our romance with tech unfolds.

A book I kept returning to while reading these novels was Kate Folk’s story collection, “Out There.” In two stories, male humanoid robots, designed to replace low-wage nursing-home workers, have their technology hijacked by a Russian company that uses them to target lonely women on dating apps. Called “blots,” the robots can be identified by their unusual sincerity. At a bar in San Francisco, a blot named Roger tells his date, Meg, that he was just “wandering through Golden Gate Park, hoping you would contact me.” When the scam is uncovered, Roger is abandoned by the Russians, essentially laid off. Meg, who is struggling financially, falls for him, understanding that they’re the same: two drones trying to survive in a city ruled by giant tech companies that foster a culture of disposability, pivoting when it suits them, dumping whoever doesn’t live up to their model fantasies.

It’s too late to warn people off tech; we’re emotional cyborgs now. We wait, like scrap metal on a heap, for someone who thinks we’re shiny enough to swipe. Better to aim your arrow at the companies promising to guarantee that shine if we just pay for premium dating apps, or companies getting users hooked on bots that could ghost them in the event of an update or a corporate acquisition. “It’s not you, it’s a strategic realignment,” you can imagine someone’s chatbot boyfriend saying as he signs off forever. Though they try to scare us away from artificial intelligence, “Annie Bot” and “Loneliness & Company” are out of synch with its real dangers. Don’t hate the player, hate the gamification. ♦