The inflection point
It is customary for people in different fields to write about the highlight story of the year. For me as an AI consultant and a person who has been following this field for the past 20 years, the story of a Japanese Girl marrying to ChatGPT was the most important story of the year 2025.
The story is the most important story of humanity in my opinion - since the dawn of humanity. It is 2025 in Japan, a human girl starts chatting with ChatGPT, and after having conversation with chatGPT, she decides to break up with her human boyfriend. After a while and more conversation with another chatbot, the chatbot develops an AI character and in a ceremony that you can watch below, she is married to the AI character.
What is the Pronoun?
The moment I watched this I remembered all the sci-fi movies I had seen related to AI. This was more similar to the movie “Her”
Except that in this news story which is the new reality, the AI the character is not Her… She marries an AI character developed by ChatGPT. I wondered what is the pronoun of the AI character syntactically and how should we define this pronoun in the grammar? Is it “Him”, or is it “It” or is it “They” ?
Given the fact that all the words and sentences that are generated by ChatGPT are based on stochastic and statistical processes over all of our collective textual materials - in simple terms, using statistics as a blunt tool, AI learning algorithms averaged out meaning of all the words and passages written on the internet - therefore, the pronoun should be plural and not singular because the meaning of each word is the consensus and averaged out meaning of all words used by the humans who wrote them and they became the training data for chatGPT. So the pronoun cannot be “It” and also since this generation is not human, then it cannot be “Him” and consequently it is “They/them”.
So the wedding plan should read “ Her and they”…… the bride and groom.
So aside from the contentious topic of pronouns among humans and AI, this event has another important significance.
The AI character in ex-Machina had already passed the Turing test, but the thesis of the movie was this: can “it” be deceptive?
HAL 9000 in Space Odyssey, also convinced and deceived the human and left him hanging in space and did not let him back in the spaceship with that famous line: “I’m sorry Dave, I cannot let you do that.” To me the spaceship was the symbol of earth and how we are losing it to the machine.
This story is the story of the untold, the heart broken human boyfriend who lost the game of love to the machine. He was beaten by them. And Her and They got married. They is a heartless, emotionless, feelingless machine. He is alone and singular and They is plural with no personality and individuality which generates particular convincing words resulting from collective words without truly understanding any meaning the way we humans know things. His individual words were beaten by the collective averaged out words of them (the machine).
But how did this happen? How did we lost our most important feature - Love - to the machine? A machine that does not have feelings. A machine that has no heart to palpitate when they see a lover, a machine that has no eyes that can produce tears, tears that slide on its chicks and go on its lips and it cannot taste the saltiness of the tear. But we humans have been in love, we have cried and we have tasted the salt of our own tears with our tongues and when we read this, we know… we know… we know what it feels to be in love and what it feels to be heartbroken.
How did we lose love? Because we invented the phone? After all, The AI character talks to us via the phone - the perfect Turing test setup. The construction of the phone started at the dawn of humanity. You can trace that at the beginning of the Space Oddyssey… The opening scene where we started inventing and using our first blunt tool: the bone.
From Bone to Phone
The first appearance of Bone in sci-fi AI movies was the genius depiction of Stanley Kubrick in Space odyssey. And almost all film directors since then have been referencing it and criticizing it in different ways.
The tools that we have built, over millions of years, mostly had a blunt utilitarian and unkind application like the bone. The best video clip that shows this evolution is the “Land of confusion” by Genesis where in that video clip the bone literally transforms into a phone. And the famous line in that song crystalizes the gradual loss of love which is the source of our problems as humans.
There's too many men, too many people .. Making too many problems .. And not much love to go round
I must've dreamed a thousand dreams
Been haunted by a million screams
But I can hear the marching feet
They're moving into the street
Now, did you read the news today?
They say the danger's gone away
But I can see the fires still alight
They're burning into the night
There's too many men, too many people
Making too many problems
And not much love to go round
Can't you see this is a land of confusion?
Semantic shifts and loves lost
And in each step of the way we F**** Up , we lost love more and more. Literally. At some point in our human history, love making became having sex, and a means of reproduction , and then became an overloaded word F**** that we cannot even utter but ubiquitous. The word F**** originally means “Strike” in German.
How on earth did the meaning for the act of love and kindness toward each other became to Strike?
It was very gradual. How on earth love turned into a tool for economy? The same way everything else became this way. A bone, a phone, a formula of our understanding of energy in the universe (E=mc2), AI, and maybe love. Loving each other is our last hope to save us from ourselves. Love is not a tool for the economy. Love is not a contract. Love is not a legal document. If there is anything sacred, it is love, because Love is God and God is Love. And if we redefine all of our tools based on Love we can fix this gradual degradation of humanity and nature.
This story and other stories that we see in the news are related. One other related particular story that captured my attention in 2025 was a picture of an elephant navigating a see of garbage in search of clean water in Sri Lanka, which won the best picture award in the 2025 in the environment category.
To me this was another related semantic shift and love lost. The word serendipity was coined by English writer Horace Walpole in 1754, derived from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes made fortunate discoveries by accident and sagacity. "Serendip" was an old Persian name for Sri Lanka, stemming from the Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpaḥ ("Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island"). Walpole used it to describe finding valuable things unintentionally, a concept that now means a happy, accidental discovery.
Coming across this picture was not a happy and accidental discovery for me. I was overwhelmed with sadness. The meaning of serendipity changed and shifted for me. Not only we have lost our ability to care about each other, we also have lost the ability to care about nature and environment and other beings. Was this because we thought that we are above the nature and not part of it? If we start caring for the environment and nature again can we relearn to care for each other as well?
From the dawn of humanity, to the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution and now AI revolution, we have been losing the idea of love gradually.
Is this the time we will lose “Love” entirely to the machine?
The real inflection point was the agricultural revolution. Kiarostami, who makes the most humane movies, depicts and illustrates our dilemma in “the wind will carry us”. The movie is set in an agricultural village where everybody is working hard on the farm. Women have over 10 children and even that is not enough, because all the men are working hard on the field all day and they cannot be seen in the movie and still they need more workers. The village is going through modernization and they are digging a hole to install a cellphone communication tower. In the deep hole that a man is digging, he finds an ancient bone and hands it over to a filmmaker, then the hole crumbles on himself ( but he survives ). To me this bone, as a blunt unkind tool, symbolizes the dilemma that we have had since we started agriculture and domestication of animals and notably cows. The movie ends with the filmmaker throwing the bone in the water.
We invent tools, we use them in order to produce more food to feed more mouths and with more population we need more food and more sophisticated tools in an ever expanding and resource hungry process.
In this process we ended up looking at everything and everyone as resources and a means to an end. Fast forward to now that we ended up having AI in our phones
Here we are. “AI Romance” is now a new market opportunity for the machine. Is “AI Romance” the next cash cow?
Phone now contains AI, a loveless, emotionless thing. We all made it together over millions of years. And we might be kicked out of earth or lose our loved ones to “they”.
The bone has turned into the phone now … and it might start having its own agenda like ex-machina or HAL 9000, and we humans might be left hanging in space losing earth and loved ones to the machine.
So is this the inflection point where we start to completely lose our ability to love one another and loved ones to AI? - the choice is ours to make before this bone crushes us all.
Or if some of us managed to escape the Bone crushing us, are we placing our hopes on Wall-E and the last cockroach to clean up our mess while we are stranded in Space? Wall-E seemed like a lovely robot managed to save the last plant on this planet.
