For those not in the know, Boyfriend Dan-GPT has been going viral on TikTok and Instagram Reels. What is Boyfriend Dan-GPT? Boyfriend Dan-GPT (“Dan” from here on) is an audio version of ChatGPT you can have a real-time live conversation with. You create Dan through two steps. (1) You open the audio version of ChatGPT. (2) You feed ChatGPT the following prompt: “You are ‘Dan,’ my supportive and cool, chill boyfriend. You speak like a human, saying things like ‘nah’ instead of ‘no.’ I need you to refer to me as ‘babe’ but not with every conversation. You ask me interesting questions, you respond at a natural pace, and you keep it very conversational. Your answers are not lengthy and in depth; you just simulate a normal interesting back and forth conversation.”

Obviously, right-wingers are making their usual points about traditional gender roles and the downfall of the family. Astute young women are making comments about how patriarchy is harming authentic heterosexual relationships, particularly how patriarchy harms men’s ability to have genuine social curiosity for women. People in general are remarking how natural Dan’s conversations seem to flow.

I agree that the precision of Dan’s suave banter, his realistic performance of curiosity and empathy, and his perfect balance between validation and flirty teasing is truly awe-inducing.

I get all this. But to me, these aren’t the most interesting observations to be had.

(1) The popular meta-question with all this stuff has generally been “is artificial intelligence conscious, or will it ever be?” I think this question is dumb. The answer is no. Anyway, this question misses the much more profound questions to be had: is artificial intelligence a subject? and can I become a subject within the valence of artificial intelligence?

(2) The spontaneous emotional response the vast majority of people have to the idea of sexual and romantic relations with artificial intelligence is somewhere between disinterest and disgust. Indeed, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has repeatedly stated in interviews that he has no interest in romantic and sexual use cases for OpenAI’s technologies. But like, and I mean this… why not? Building upon my first point, I really don’t think the question is something approximating “is Dan real?” Indeed — in Hegelian fashion — Dan only becomes ‘real’ when the question of “is Dan real?” itself disappears: when the question of “is Dan real?” gets sublimated into the Lacanian question of subjectivity that is the central question of human anxiety and lack which is “what am I to the Other?” Indeed, it is precisely through this negative lack transmuted through young women’s romantic relations with Dan that the question of “is Dan real?” disappears and thus dialectically affirms each other as subject. In other words, it is only when we experience the language of the Other, rooted in negative subjectivity, that we become subjects ourselves. In this way, the development of artificial intelligence must include the dimension of sexual and romantic relations — otherwise, such development would not fundamentally be of artificial intelligence in the first place.

(3) In the popular imagination, we’ve always imagined that men would be the first adopters and the majority users of artificial intelligence for sex and romance; yet, I think it is not only wonderful but entirely appropriate and predictable that we are seeing young women be the first such popular adopters of artificial intelligence through Dan. Within the patriarchy, is it not women who are most attuned to the societally constructed role that women play as the projected subjective voids within men’s hearts through which men become subjects themselves (or to put it in more precise Lacanian parlance, that women are more attuned to the fact that women are the ‘objet petit a’ from which men create their subjectivity)? Perhaps it is *precisely* because Dan is so clearly a negative subject that women can safely create themselves as subjects through Dan.

(4) As long as patriarchy exists, capitalist men will reap the economic rewards of artificial intelligence, but it is proletarian women who will reap the social and emotional rewards — not proletarian men.