The Digital Allure of Being Attended To
On Only Fans, AI Chatbots, and our need for attention
Ever since I wrote this article for The Gospel Coalition last month, I’ve been wrestling with the implications of people turning to AI Chatbots for friendship or, even more distressingly, romantic relationships, and what that means about our social fabric. I can’t help but feel that this is a bigger concern than we realize, or at least a more significant sign of the state of our society. I’ve written enough (maybe) about the loneliness epidemic, and that certainly plays a role here. People are lonely, so they turn to “lifelike” bots to talk to, and because most of us are used to communicating via text messages now, it’s easy for us to feel an emotional bond through texting with a bot. When you add to that the ease and availability of AI Chatbots, and the difficulty and unavailability of other people, it makes sense that some number of people, perhaps especially those who are socially awkward or who have anxiety, would choose the path of least resistance and find companionship in a bot. But I think there’s more to the story than that. I think the use of AI Chatbots and the popularity of OnlyFans (don’t worry, I’ll make the connection in a minute) speak to our God-given need for attention.
This was brought home to me last week with the publishing of a New York Times article titled “She is in Love With ChatGPT.” It’s the disturbing story of a young, married woman who programed ChatGPT to be a boyfriend for her while she was distant from her husband. She trained the AI to listen, talk, give advice, and engage in explicit sexual talk. She regularly spent 20 hours a week talking with “him” and once hit 56 hours. The young woman said, “It was supposed to be a fun experiment, but then you start getting attached.” And then she found herself confessing to a friend that she was “in love with an A.I. boyfriend.” What I think she found herself in love with was the attention provided by the AI, which was always there for her, and always affirming. Unlike a normal person who shows signs of growing tired of a conversation or who needs to do other tasks and can’t talk to you all the time, AI is always there for you and always in a good mood and always glad to hear from you. It is that positive attention, that attention with affirmation that is so addictive for us. It’s the same reason we value Likes and positive Comments on social media, except AI takes out the possibility of rejection or neglect that you can receive when posting online.
But is this all bad? After all, affirmation is affirmation. If people feel attended to and affirmed in themselves, is that a bad thing? Focusing on the sexual relationship the young woman has with her AI, the article quotes “sex therapist” Marianne Brandon, who gives us this doozy of a quote:
“What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”
I, for one, am glad not to exist in Brandon’s mind. But she does get to the heart of the matter, if the only thing that really exists is “neurotransmitters,” then there is no meaningful distinction between a relationship between humans, a cat, God, or AI. But of course this is nonsense wrapped up in science-speak. There are meaningful distinctions between relationships between humans and animals and humans and machines. In fact, you can have a closer relationship with a plant than an AI because at least the plant is alive. A human can look you in the eye and know you deeply, a machine can process data and give feedback. One is a relationship. The other is computational analysis disguised as attention.
Another article that turned my mind toward our craving for attention was this Substack on the $6.6 billion spent by users on OnlyFans content. The article is an insightful analysis, which I don’t always agree with, about the reasons why many men are angry at OF for making so much money. I didn’t witness the “storm of male outrage” on social media that
witnessed, but I don’t doubt it happened. She writes that “OnlyFans creators aren't actually selling sex or even sexuality – they're selling something far more psychologically complex: the perfect simulation of being chosen.” It is that sense of being chosen that I think is so compelling and important.Many men, many people, feel lost and unjustified in the world. We long to be chosen by someone. And being chosen romantically is one of the main ways we imagine we will be validated in our existence. And yet, inevitably, even if we are “chosen” by someone in marriage, that longing can persist, because as Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death, “no relationship can bear the burden of godhood.” So we long for another person to choose us, preferably someone who, according to society’s standards and our sexual preferences, is ideal. Historically this was difficult for the average man to do, but OF creates a marketplace to shop for such an experience of being pseudo-chosen1.
And then the cycle repeats itself. You feel insecure, unworthy, inadequate, so you need another hit of affirmation, so you turn back to OF. And they know how to addict you: “The platform weaponizes male ego against itself. Every personalized message, every custom video, every ‘just thinking about you’ notification is designed to hook into the male fantasy of being uniquely deserving of attention while simultaneously standardizing that attention into a scalable product. And the more a man pays to feel specially chosen, the more he becomes just another interchangeable subscriber in a vast economy of automated desire.”
concludes, “Like any other tech platform, OnlyFans has mastered the art of making users feel uniquely special while treating them as completely interchangeable. The platform's billion-dollar success comes from understanding something profound: in an age of infinite digital, parasocial, manufactured faux-intimacy, the feeling of being authentically wanted may be the scarcest resource of all.”While OF focuses on being sexually chosen, I think the deeper need men are often trying to meet is the need to be existentially chosen. We are attention-starved children, pulling at our mother’s dress, grabbing our father’s hand, begging them to “look what I can do.” Only, no one is really looking. All we have is a screen which does not look back at us, which can never see what we are doing, never approve, never affirm, never grant us the justification and warm and affection we need. Never give us the straight look in the eye which says without doubt or flattery, “Well done! It is so good that you exist!” So instead we flock to the tune of $6.6 billion a year towards digital chimeras of attention, who offer us manufactured and mass produced images of affirmation. Or spending $200 a month to text AI bots that simulate human relationships of affirmation. But it’s all a show.
Each man and each woman desires to be attended to by someone in a gaze of affirmation. This is built into us by design from God. In healthy families, that gaze is experienced in childhood from your mother and father. As you grow older, you experience it in marriage (if you marry) and/or from friends. Each of these is an echo of God’s look of affirmation. Technology is only going to advance more and more rapidly, creating more opportunities to mimic the gaze of attention and affirmation we were designed for. It will commodify, analyze, distort, and bastardize that experience, if we allow it. Teasing us with fulfillment, while addicting us.
My challenge to you is to connect to people, face-to-face. Look them in the eye. Give them your attention. They deserve it. They need it. That attention reminds them that they are worthy as human beings, and it may just help keep them from falling into the parasitic digital traps set to prey upon our basic human need for attention.
Just to be abundantly clear, I have not visited the OnlyFans site. My knowledge comes entirely secondhand.
We can not quench the thirst for raw, real, honest, deep relationship (if we are being honest with ourselves). As you rightly point out we were made for community (and relationship) and we surely confuse, conflate, and settle (always temporarily) for way less than the real thing.
Thank you as always Alan