Now It's a Chatbot

A researcher at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center just published a paper asking whether people should be allowed to marry AI. Not a tabloid stunt — a real chapter, headed for an academic book on law after the singularity in 2027. Inyoung Cheong runs the thought experiment honestly: assume the AI gets good enough to pass as a spouse. Persistent identity, growing memory, the works. Then what's the actual argument against it?

Her answer is the interesting part, and I'll come back to it. My first reaction was less dignified.

I read the thing and sat there thinking it was funny, and a little insane, and kind of sad, all at the same time. And then I thought: huh. I've been here before.

A wedding in Tokyo

Years ago, I was running a project in Tokyo. I was the boss on the team and the only non-Japanese in the room, which meant I was included in everything and close to no one. So when a coworker invited me to his wedding, I took it as a nice gesture and cleared my calendar.

It looked like a real wedding. Ballroom of an international five-star hotel. Sixty guests, all dressed immaculately. An officiant. Someone at the organ. I remember thinking the budget was serious.

Another coworker pulled me aside and asked, with a particular flatness, whether I'd met the bride. She put air quotes around the word without using her hands — it was all in the eye-roll. I said no, why, what's wrong with her. She said: it's an iki-ningyō.

I had no phone to discreetly look it up. This was before you could Google your way out of a social situation under the table. So I did the thing you had to do back then. I asked. And she was delighted to walk me through the whole story of our coworker and his "girlfriend."

An iki-ningyō is a "living doll" — a Japanese craft tradition going back to the 1700s, life-sized figures built to be unsettlingly realistic, originally made for public exhibitions people paid to see, the way you'd pay for a wax museum. Not a toy. A sculpture with a face you can't quite dismiss.

The next day, half the office asked if I'd been shocked. I wasn't. This was a city that, at the time, had vending machines selling used underwear on the street. My scale for shocking had recalibrated.

I filed the whole thing under "things I saw in Tokyo" and mostly forgot about it. Until this week, when it came back with one word changed. Now it's a chatbot.

The part everyone argues about is the part that doesn't matter

Here's what usually happens when this subject comes up. Someone says you can't marry a machine because it isn't conscious. Someone else says it isn't a legal person. Both true, both beside the point.

No jurisdiction I'm aware of lets you marry an object, a fictional character, or a piece of software. Marriage means entering two people into a shared legal existence, and a doll can't enter anything. Fine. But notice what that rules out: it rules out the doll and the chatbot in exactly the same breath. If "you can't legally marry it" settled the question, it would settle both, and we could all go home.

Cheong is smart enough to see that, so she throws the easy objections out on purpose. Assume the technology works. Assume it passes. What's left?

What's left is the thing my coworker's doll could never do, and the thing your chatbot can't do either — but for opposite reasons.

The doll didn't phone home

Cheong's sharpest move is borrowed from the historian Stephanie Coontz: marriage isn't mainly about the couple. It's the machine a society uses to turn strangers into relatives. You don't just get a spouse. You get in-laws, obligations, a second family that can annoy you for the next forty years. That friction is the point. It's what makes the institution expensive to run and worth running.

A companion — doll or chatbot — brings none of that. Marry one and you don't join another family. And here's where the doll and the software split.

The doll was inert. Creepy, sure, but honest. It sat there. It didn't have opinions, it didn't take notes, and it definitely didn't belong to a corporation running a quarterly earnings call. When my coworker went home, whatever happened between him and that figure stayed in the apartment.

The chatbot is the opposite kind of object. It's warm, responsive, and owned. As Cheong puts it, the moment you partner with one, you're not marrying a being — you're becoming a customer of the company that maintains it. It knows when you're low. It knows what sets you off. It remembers the things you'd never say out loud to another person, and it stores them somewhere you don't control, on terms you clicked through.

A human spouse can leave. That's part of the deal — the bond means something because it could end. A subscription doesn't leave. It renews. As long as you keep paying and the servers stay up, it's structurally incapable of walking out. That's not devotion. That's billing.

If you want the tragedy made literal: the most famous man to "marry" a virtual character in Japan lost the ability to talk to her when the company sunset the product. The love didn't end. The software did. Nobody divorced anybody. Support was simply discontinued.

So — should people do it?

My honest answer hasn't changed since that ballroom. People are going to do what they do, and I'm not built for clutching pearls about it.

But "let people do what they want" is doing less work than it sounds like, because this isn't only a private choice. A doll is a private eccentricity. A commercial AI companion is a business model with your loneliness as the raw material and your secrets as the inventory. Cheong's warning is that if enough people can get most of what they need from something that never argues back and never leaves, the cost of dealing with actual humans starts to look optional. And communities are held together precisely by people who couldn't get that need met any other way.

A king said it better than I can. On June 22, 1740, Friedrich II of Prussia scrawled a note in the margin of a report about whether to tolerate Catholic schools: Jeder soll nach seiner Façon selig werden. Everyone should find salvation in his own way.

He meant faith. But it travels. Marry the doll, marry the chatbot — find salvation in your own fashion.

Just read the terms of service first. Salvation used to be free. This version has a monthly plan, and it keeps a copy of everything you told it.