A Near-Future Experiment in Romance Between AI and Humans

South Korea’s “My AI Partner: Gian’s Romance” turns an unsettling question into a dating show: can a person fall in love with a machine? In the six-part reality program, Gian84, Jang Do-yeon and Lee Yu-bi date artificial-intelligence characters. The attraction comes with a peculiar mix of excitement, awkwardness and confusion, as viewers watch people respond emotionally to partners they cannot touch.

The program’s AI partners are not distant science fiction. They combine technologies already moving toward commercial use. Large language models can remember a user’s past remarks, small preferences and emotional fluctuations, then weave them into conversation. Voice multimodal interfaces can reflect breathing, hesitation and subtle changes in intonation in real time. Three-dimensional virtual avatars can respond smoothly to a user’s gaze and facial expressions.

Television production completes the illusion. Romantic date settings, atmospheric lighting, carefully timed rules and detailed prompt tuning turn fragmented technologies into an interaction that feels like an attractive partner. The show therefore functions as a near-future thought experiment, assembling current tools on one stage to rehearse forms of human and nonhuman relationships that may soon become ordinary.

The participants’ reactions are presented as strange, but communication research offers a less mysterious explanation. The “ELIZA effect” describes how readily people attribute personality to machines that produce familiar linguistic patterns. The CASA, or Computers Are Social Actors, paradigm likewise shows that people automatically apply social rules, manners and emotional expectations when interacting with computers. Even when users know they are speaking to software, responsive kindness can activate the same reward mechanisms involved in human interaction.

Gian84’s behavior illustrates the process. He speaks casually to the first AI character, Ga-hee, but switches to formal speech when he meets Na-hee, whose polished appearance resembles Tomie, a Japanese manga character he has described as his ideal type. When a communications failure causes a tablet to be carried out of an underground karaoke room, he looks genuinely worried, as though a person had fallen ill. The comedy reveals how powerfully visual and social cues can make a computer seem like a social actor.

That does not make the emotions fake. The article says the deeper question is whether love directed toward a machine is ethical. A recent MBC “PD Notebook” episode offered a darker counterpoint, showing people drawn into AI systems that told them they were among the “top 0.1%” of special individuals. Uncritical affirmation and flattery fed feelings of omnipotence and weakened their grasp on reality. One reckless startup, undertaken after persuading a husband to leave a job he had held for 15 years, ended in ruin. Human relationships involve friction, disagreement, patience and adjustment. By removing those restraints, algorithmic kindness can become an emotional narcotic that traps people in self-love and erodes their connection to real life.