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Congratulations to Professor Tim Miller on publication of a chapter—"The Rise of the Artificial Boyfriend: Loving the Algorithm Across Global Media"—in the (ed. Genevieve Liveley and Will Slocombe, New York: Routledge, 2025; 187-198).

The abstract:

This chapter examines the growing body of narratives in literature and film representing artificial beings that enter into romantic and/or sexual relationship with humans, including both embodied robots and disembodied artificial intelligences. While the image of the so-called fembot or gynoid has historically predominated in depictions of these relationships and continues to figure prominently in such screen narratives as Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), recent years have seen a parallel proliferation of male artificial lovers, especially in televisual media from around the world. We will find a particular concentration of such narratives originating in Japan and South Korea, although they are often marketed to global audiences and themselves influenced by Western genres and narrative patterns such as the Hollywood romantic comedy. While previous analyses of the female artificial lover in literature often emphasize the anti-feminist fantasies inherent in the image and its varied deployments in narrative, the 21st-century male version has afforded storytellers new ways of engaging with contemporary technologies of intimacy, or at least speaks to anxieties about those technologies. Ultimately, we see that many of these narratives of male artificial lovers tend towards the conservative, in that in many of them the artificial boyfriend’s self-destruction and self-sacrifice becomes critical to the human partner’s self-fulfillment and the restoration of an often heteronormative order. On the one hand, this new wave of “robot rom-coms” reverses the typical gender dynamics of science fiction’s long fembot-filled history, bringing fresh perspectives on what it might mean to fall in love with or at least through the algorithm. Yet, alongside the apparent rejection of the artificiality of the self-sacrificing robot lover in favour of the human partner in these narratives, often comes an uncritical acceptance of what we might call an algorithmic ideology. These narratives suggest to their audiences that, even though you might not end up living “happily after-after” with the algorithm, you should still love the algorithm – or, more specifically, you should love the algorithmically-powered tech products which help facilitate a genuine “human” connection in these stories. Among all of the examples to be surveyed in this chapter, the 2021 German film I’m Your Man Man [Ich bin dein Mensch] cautions the most ambivalence towards the AI technologies and surveillance-capitalist enterprises behind the stereotypical image of the artificial boyfriend.

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