How Falling for a Hot AI Influencer Weirdly Helped My Tech Anxiety

The other week, while enjoying wine and pink pasta at a friend’s house, someone in the group mentioned a piece of love advice she recently heard—that everyone, no matter their relationship status, should always aim to have five crushes: someone you’d never hook up with, someone you realistically would hook up with, a work crush, a celebrity crush, and a wild card.As we shared our crush picks, I realized I’d never actually had romantic feelings for a celebrity. Finding someone hot is one thing, but how could I have a full-on “crush” on a person I didn’t even know? It always felt a bit irrational to project a bunch of dreamy expectations on a famous person with whom a million other people are in their own one-sided relationships. Maybe it’s not that deep, but I just… didn’t get the concept.Jokes on me though, because as of two months ago, I’ve finally experienced my first celebrity crush, and it’s on someone who isn’t even real: an AI-generated time-travel influencer named Chloe. Okay, so Chloe, who fronts the YouTube channel “Chloe Vs. History,” isn’t a celebrity per se, but the definition of “celebrity” has been stretched so thin in the influencer era that why shouldn’t non-sentient bombshells count?I found Chloe the way I find most things these days: my algorithm. I’m a sucker for entertaining science and history content, so there’s no surprise that the algo served her right up for me on a silver platter. And I’ve been gobbling her content down ever since.Chloe doesn’t vlog her way through Paris or Thailand. That’s human stuff. Instead, she films herself wandering through the Titanic’s dining room, Ancient Egyptian pyramids, the sub-zero Ice Age, and so much more, all with the casual rizz of a beautiful vlogger who just so happens to have been engineered with the help of Utopai Studios’s PAI 2.0.I binged her entire catalogue of 25 YouTube shorts back-to-back in one sitting, staring rapt into her twinkly, unseeing eyes.Sure, Chloe’s vlogs aren’t always period-accurate (I watched a fact-checker review her tour of Pompeii and point out problems with her outfits and the Vesuvius eruption, among other things). But the heart wants what it wants, and these blunders have no impact on my feelings for Chloe.I’m bisexual and realized my interest in Chloe was more than casual after I binged her entire catalogue of 25 YouTube shorts back-to-back in one sitting, staring rapt into her twinkly, unseeing eyes. Even now, I wait with bated breath for Chloe’s next video to drop, like an unrequited lover sitting by the phone. And I’m not alone in my obsession. It’s obvious that Chloe’s 388K+ YouTube subscribers and 135K+ TikTok followers aren’t only there for a factually questionable tour of the pyramids. Her comments are full of intense swooning from fellow crushers. I laughed out loud when I read the following comment under her latest video: “I don’t care that she is fake, I am in love with Chloe.” Same, dude, same.Human or nay, Chloe is just my type: adventurous and curious with full lips and a big, awestruck smile. I bet she’d be incredible to make out with on the dance floor of the Titanic’s D-deck. Chloe looks equally gorgeous as a shipwrecked passenger, a Gold Rush cowgirl, a Tudor peasant, and a Woodstock hippie. Who could resist?“I didn’t get an invite to Coachella this year, so I came to Woodstock in 1969 instead,” Chloe says, opening her Woodstock vlog in a peasant dress and paisley headband. Halfway through the video, she falls into a mud pit while dancing and just cracks up laughing. To mud-wrestle with Chloe, Jimi Hendrix shredding in the background, would be my wildest erotic fantasy. She’s so whimsical! So unselfconscious! (Okay, maybe if I had no self to be conscious of, I’d be that fancy-free, too.)My husband thinks my feelings for Chloe are a little strange, but also unexpected and cute, since he knows how much I otherwise hate AI.To gut-check my confusing “relationship” to this robot, I showed her to one of my fellow bi besties and guess what? She developed a crush on Chloe, too. I felt so relieved (and a little jealous, but whatever). Knowing someone I love and respect was just as smitten with this pixelized goddess definitely helped me feel less insane. This friend and I are also both married, and it occurred to me that developing a crush on a non-real person felt both fun and non-threatening. My husband thinks my feelings for Chloe are a little strange, but also unexpected and cute, since he knows how much I otherwise hate AI.It’s true. I do have some qualms with Chloe. I wish her AI-generated vlogs weren’t so taxing on the planet. I’m genuinely horrified by the social, environmental, and existential harms of AI and the data centers that power them. I’m also hyper-aware of (and scandalized by) stories of people losing themselves in uncanny, pseudo-romantic relationships with AI chatbots. And like most people who make and/or care about art, I’ve spent the past year in a high-grade panic about AI slopifying and automating the mediums I love most. I spent the other week in a full-blown existential crashout over the way that certain AI writing scandals have started to erode readers’ trust in authors and corrupt writers’ processes. So trust me when I say I was not prepared to betray my own values by becoming parasocially besotted with a hot AI girl.At the same time, comparatively speaking, I also think Chloe’s creator, an AI hobbyist named Jeremy Laramy, is using this technology in good faith. Time travel isn’t real, so he’s clearly not trying to steal anyone’s job or paint Chloe as a living person. If I sound like I’m riddled with cognitive dissonance and doing way too much to justify a type of content that I can’t morally excuse, that’s because I am.Perhaps Chloe is showing me a more hopeful side of what this technology can do, so that I stop spiraling unproductively about it ruining everything I love about real life.But I think I might have a theory as to why my crush on Chloe vs. History feels okay. I’ll frame it like this: Once, I coaxed myself into developing a crush on an intimidating coworker. I did this as a coping mechanism, so that every time I saw their name in my email inbox, I would get excited rather than stressed. Maybe, on some level, that’s what I’m doing with Chloe—only the source of stress isn’t work, it’s AI.I am fully aware that Chloe and I have no shot of working out (you know, considering the whole robot thing), but I think she’s helping me anyway. Perhaps Chloe is showing me a more hopeful side of what this technology can do, so that I stop spiraling unproductively about it ruining everything I love about real life. Weird that it took a dash of limerence to make that happen, but I guess that in and of itself is hopeful. Turns out, my AI doom salve was one of the most human things there is: a good old-fashioned crush.