Is it cheating if your illicit affair is with AI?

Kat Rosenfield and Kate Lindsay debate

Photos by Dennis Larance

This week, Katherine Dee invited a few writers—including Aella, Paul Bloom, blassie, Noelle Perdue, and Sean Monahan—to debate the digital sexual revolution at the Teatro ZinZanni in Chicago.

Here, we present the opening arguments of Kat Rosenfield, a pop culture and political writer, and kate lindsay, the co-founder of Embedded, from their debate: Is it cheating if your illicit affair is with AI?

Kate Lindsay: “Go forth, I say to humanity—go forth and bone.”

In the beginning, there was the word, and that word was spelled A/S/L.¹

For the past 30 years, human beings have used the internet as a tool for some kind of sexual gratification. There’s porn, of course, but the real innovation was anonymous, digital interaction with strangers through the advent of chatrooms, from which words like “cybersex” and “sexting” entered the zeitgeist.

But the obstacle for having sex online remains the same one as in real life: you have to find someone or something that wants to do it with you.

Enter: AI.

I disdain the use of AI in almost every scenario. Grocery-list ideas and maid-of-honor speeches and therapy as a practice are not problems to be innovated away—at least, not at the expense of an entire town’s drinking water.

But AI does have one compelling use case, and that’s in regard to humanity’s age-old urge to bone. If there is not a willing partner available to bone, while the natural reaction should be acceptance, many of us are acutely aware that that is rarely the outcome. I’d rather someone who cannot find consensual sex with a human turn to the next best thing, instead of turning [with] force toward the first.

I’ll acknowledge that’s not exactly the question here, although I do believe it’s important context for the one that is: What if a person has a partner to bone but they turn to AI anyway? Are they “cheating”? I believe they are not.

First, I turn to the words of couples therapist Orna Guralnik, who I interviewed for GQ about this very question:

While the feelings a chatbot elicits may be real, the relationship is not. She likens it to the way children play with dolls or other forms of pretend. “You’re kind of in an intermediary space between your own solipsistic fantasy world and reality.”

But those are just the words of one extremely well-dressed woman. To illustrate this as an objective truth, we must look at the words themselves.

Cheating, in this context, is to be sexually unfaithful. There are other well-known subcategories, like emotional cheating, but for the purposes of my argument, let’s focus on Oxford’s definition.

To be unfaithful is defined by this same source as “engaging in sexual relations with a person other than one’s regular partner in contravention of a previous promise or understanding.”

Now, there’s a lot to nitpick in there, but I believe one word trumps them all: person. Engaging in sexual relations with a person other than one’s regular partner.

To define “person” is to open up a can of worms that’s thousands of years old. We can look at it philosophically: “I think, therefore I am.” We can look at it legally, with the U.S. defining personhood as “a quantifying designation that refers to a human being or non-human entity that is treated as a person with limiting applications.”

Or we can look at it with our two fucking eyeballs and acknowledge that the thing we cannot touch, taste, or smell does not materially exist.

“I think, therefore I am”? The AI telling you harder, better, faster, stronger is not thinking. It is recognizing patterns and making predictions. It does not care if you orgasm. (Though, I’ll admit, not every human does either.)

But really, I come at this issue from the other direction. If we designate AI as a person, this opens up ramifications far beyond sex. This would allow an AI bot to beat you in court, to claim discrimination if you don’t want it taking your job, to vote. It would be given power in things it is in no way impacted by because it does not require housing, income, or even food to survive.

AI is a tool, no different from your vibrator or Fleshlight, except it’s worse than those things, sexually speaking, because you cannot put your dick in it, nor it in you.

To advocate for AI’s personhood in the bedroom is to rattle off a series of the most pedantic “well, actuallys” known to mankind, following perhaps the technical, theoretical loophole of laws, but not the spirit of our understanding of ourselves.

Because the truth is, what makes someone human is gloriously indefinable, not by Oxford nor Descartes. The moment the entire scope of who and what we are can be summarized in a sentence is the moment when our humanity is lost.

And it’s this optimism for humanity that brings me to my conclusion today: that sex with AI is not a transgression but a natural expression of those undefinable wants and urges and feelings that make up the sum of our human parts. Go forth, I say to humanity—go forth and bone.

Kat Rosenfield: “In this scenario, everyone is getting cheated out of something”

I’m here to argue that it is in fact cheating to be intimately involved with a robot that lives on the internet. Before I start trying to persuade you, I want to talk about the challenge we face—not the challenge of Oh my god, how will I tell my husband I’ve been having a torrid, meme-based affair with Grok? but the challenge of defining terms. We can’t talk about whether AI boyfriends are cheating without first agreeing on what cheating is, and, as anyone who has ever watched Friends knows, this is probably one of the most divisive questions of our time. I mean, show of hands: How many of you agree that Ross and Rachel were on a break?

Just kidding, put your hands down. Save yourselves. Some questions are too fraught even for a Substack debate.

So I want to talk about cheating in the abstract, about all the different things it can mean. Ask 50 people what cheating is, and you’ll probably get 50 different answers. Some people earnestly believe, for instance, that pornography is cheating—because you’re indulging in lustful impulses toward someone other than your partner. That’s one end of the spectrum.

And at the other end, you have people like this guy I used to know; I’m going to call him Steve, which is not his real name. Steve and his wife were my downstairs neighbors in Brooklyn 17 years ago. They had gotten married right around the same time as my husband and I did. This one night, Steve stops by our apartment and starts telling me and my husband about how he recently went to another city for work.

And while he was there, Steve went to a bar and picked up not one, but two, women and took them back to his hotel room and had sex with both of them.

And I was kind of scandalized by this! I said, “Wow, dude, you’ve been married like five minutes and you’re already cheating on her?” And Steve said, “Oh no, it’s not cheating.” And I said, “How do you figure?” And he said, “Because I didn’t come.”

And he left and my husband and I turned to each other, and I said, “HE DIDN’T COME?” and my husband said, “IF THAT GUY EVER KNOCKS ON OUR DOOR AGAIN, PLEASE DO NOT LET HIM IN.”

And look, I think if you asked Steve’s wife about this, she would probably be like, “He said what?” But who knows, maybe that was in their marital contract. To have and to hold, forsaking all others, but if you don’t come it doesn’t count. But what I’m getting at, and I think we can all agree on this—I think even Steve would agree—is that there’s more than one way to cheat. The most traditional of which is having sexual intercourse with another person, but it’s not the only one. Because when we talk about cheating, what we’re really talking about is betrayal. We’re talking about being untrue to the promises you made, doing something that weakens the foundations of the life you’ve built with another person. We’re talking about cheating your partner out of the fullness of your love and affection because you’re investing that love in someone else.

Some people, perhaps even the person I’m debating against tonight, will say, “But a chatbot isn’t someone. It isn’t a person.” That’s true—but only because it’s actually something worse. It is an addictive experience that pretends to be a person, and that tricks you into treating it like one. It’s a fundamentally vampiric entity: the only way to get an AI to talk to you like a lover, to give you an experience that feels like romantic or sexual intimacy, is to pour yourself into it in the form of prompts that reveal the deepest part of who you are. It can’t give you anything unless it takes from you first.

Basically, your chatbot lover is like Frankenstein’s monster, if he built the monster out of his own body parts, using pieces of his own brain. Picture that for a second. Okay? Picture the monster.

Now picture Frankenstein fucking the monster.

It sounds gross when I put it that way, right? But not just that. It sounds like the kind of thing you maybe shouldn’t be doing if you’re supposed to be in a committed relationship with another human being. It sounds like a thing that, if you did it too much, might really destroy that relationship.

It’s not just that you’re stealing from a finite well of energy and attention—energy that you would otherwise be investing in your primary relationship. It’s not just: What do you forget to tell your spouse, or choose not to share, because you already told your AI boyfriend?

It’s: What do you forget how to do in your shared life with another person, because you’re recalibrating your notion of what intimacy is, what love is, what sex is, based on your relationship with a nonhuman entity that can simulate these things but never feel them?

What happens to your humanity when you take the best and most beautiful parts of it, the parts made for embodied connection with another person, and you give it to the algorithm?

I would argue that this isn’t just cheating but one of the most insidious kinds, because in this scenario, everyone is getting cheated out of something—your partner, yes, but you are too.

Watch the rest of this debate—and others, including “Is social media reprogramming sexual desires, or are they innate?” and “Will AI take over the porn industry?”—here.

1. Age / Sex / Location.